Statistics from the 2021 Population and Housing Census (PHC) conducted by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) have revealed that 1,215,546 children being denied their rights to learn and grow.
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Over 1.2 million children in Ghana not attending school
Children in Ghana are out of school and working in jobs that are often strenuous and dangerous.
School children
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And out of the over 1.2 million children not going to school, 942,427 children have never attended school.
Statistics from the GSS report indicated that the newly created regions Savannah Region has 43.2% of children who have never attended school which is the highest percentage in the country.
These findings are contained in the 2021 PHC Thematic Brief on Childhood Vulnerabilities in Ghana which presents statistics on children in Ghana focusing on the number and distribution of vulnerable children and the correlates of child vulnerabilities.
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School pupils
Pulse Ghana
It stated that over a quarter of a million children (275,562), aged 5 to 17 years have difficulty in performing activities in at least one of the following domains: sight, hearing, physical (walking or climbing stairs), intellectual (remembering or concentrating), self-care, and speech.
The poverty levels in which these children live are also appalling as the report "further indicates that one-third of the household population under 18 years representing 3,862,259 children are multidimensionally poor. The regions with the highest numbers, Greater Accra (550, 118) and Ashanti (539, 048) have more than half a million children each being multidimensionally poor."
There are 5,976 children in Ghana living without shelter i.e. sleeping outdoors. About two in every five (43.6%) of the children without shelter are in the Greater Accra Region, which has the highest share followed by the Ashanti (15.7%) and Eastern (5.4%) regions.
Meanwhile, Right to Play Ghana, a non-governmental organization with a focus on play-based learning has reported that 1.9 million children are out of school because of child labour in Ghana.
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The majority of child labourers in Ghana work in agriculture, often on cocoa farms where they harvest pods by hand for export. Ghana is one of the world’s biggest producers of cocoa.
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