Street Academy Board holds Annual General Meeting

By Amadu Kamil Sanah, GNA

Accra, Oct. 4, GNA - Madam Leticia Appiah, Executive Director of the National Population Council, has said parents have both legal and physical responsibilities to help their children grow into productive healthy adults.

She said the essential responsibilities that parents must adhere to in order to foster the well being of their children include a safe environment, proper nutrition, education, health care, self-esteem needs, value clarification and developing mutual respect with the children.

Madam Appiah was speaking at the Annual General Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Street Academy in Accra.

She said providing discipline is the effective and appropriate means for parents who need to also know their children by spending quality time with them.

Madam Appiah said there is the need for parents to be prepared as raising children comes with a set of physical and emotional needs that must be met.

“Failure of parents to meet these needs can have wide raging and long lasting negative effect on their families and the society.”

She said it is the vision of the National Population Council to improve and sustain the quality of life with emphasis on families having the number of children their finances can comfortably cater for.

Madam Lydia Sackey, Chairperson of the Board of Trustees, said the Street Academy was established in 1989 with a focus to support street children and needs the support from all stakeholders.

She said the most sustainable means of developing every country’s human resource base was to develop its future leaders to be able to contribute meaningfully in its national development efforts.

Madam Sackey said there is the need to take children off the streets and train them to become future leaders, adding that, “the street academy has a special class which is the first stop where every student is provided with learning materials to learn how to speak and construct basic sentences.”

She said the academy is collaborating with the Ghana Education Service where the children are accessed and taken to their expected classes.

“With the help of MTN, we now have the ’street academy building’ where the children would spend a maximum of three years in the school and are then sent to the formal sectors.”

The Chairperson of the Board said there were two major institutions financing the academy and these institutions are Senior Hands based in Denmark and Senior Hands in the United States.

“Every year a stakeholders meeting is conducted to raise funds to supplement what the two institutions are doing. The agenda for this year’s stakeholders meeting is to get sponsors in order to get more children out of the streets because we believe they have a future.

“Our sponsorship from the Senior Hands institutions is coming to an end and we currently have about 40 children in street academy, however, there are about 100 children dispersed in various schools to gain formal education already.”

GNA

Read Full Story