In her article, “New Laws, Old Values: Indigenous Resistance to Children’s Rights in Ghana”, Janice Windborne describes how despite Ghana's role as the first country to sign the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, Ghanaian children still struggle to realize those rights decades later.
Windborne states that in the dialogue around human rights, Westerners hold the belief that human rights are universal and belong to every individual. Conversely, citizens of developing nations believe in cultural relativity or that individuals cannot be separate from their culture and human rights must be defined within that culture. She poses questions about children’s human rights: “Does the child have human rights independent of the needs, desires, and values of the parent? Or does the child belong first to the community and the family with rights only flowing through those relationships?”
Windborne goes on to describe that Ghanaian children remain unpaid workers whose rights are subsumed beneath the needs of the family. Children are resigned to their powerlessness before the will of adults. This will continue, until poverty is alleviated at a certain level.
Along with their new constitution in 1992, Ghana created the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, which would uphold the UN Convention through protecting children. However, Windborne notes that simultaneously Ghana was mandated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to restructure its economy. Structural adjustments included major cutbacks, layoffs, and currency devaluation. Consequently, Ghanaian families experienced economic pressure which forced many to migrate to urban areas for work, as the cost of living also increased. More children worked to provide for families, and in order for older children to go to school, younger ones were denied the opportunity. Also many children had to go live with family members in distant regions in order to find work. When separated from their families, the children had decreased support from their families. There is also the ongoing disparity between boys and girls educational attainment and the roles that girls play in caring for their families and being denied educational opportunity.
The government has not adjusted policies and practices to address the social and economic problems which deny children human rights of education and empowerment. Younger children compete with older for their rights, while girls compete with boys for their rights, and children collectively compete with the family’s livelihood and the economy for their rights.
As a UT student in partnership with Ghanaian development, I consider how the boys and young men at Hope Boy’s Home are impacted by the issues described by Windborne. The children there are fostered because their parents have developmental disabilities and are unable to support them.
The boys live independently from their families and may not necessarily face the same powerlessness within their family dynamics, yet may still reckon with a sense of powerlessness. I do not know this for sure though, and imagine that each child’s situation is unique. However, living in community foster home away from traditional family support presents its own challenges. I have been told that the Hope Home has become a large family for the boys, with a strong community of caregivers, role models, and adults who care for the boys as families do for each other. I am also aware that the boys attend school, and the young men currently work to save money for high school, or currently attend high school. Ms. Rosie explained that the young men are extremely serious about obtaining their education and spend most of their time studying and preparing for school. The Convention on the Rights of the Child states that human rights include education, and children’s rights to receive love and understanding from their family. It seems that the foster home creates an environment which supports the boys’ educational attainment and healthy emotional development.
In relation to the mentorship program, I find an incredible amount of hope in the promotion of human rights through the empowerment of the children. The program provides opportunities for the children to feel loved and supported and helps them to develop their hopes and dreams, and to realize them. It is a sincere privilege to contribute to this program and its promotion of human rights for children.
Read the Convention on the Rights of the Child here: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm
Reference
Windborne, J. (2006). New laws, old values: Indigenous resistance to children’s rights in Ghana. Atlantic Journal of Communication. 14(3), 156-172.
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