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Children living in institutional care are more likely than their family-based peers to experience abuse, neglect, exploitation, lack of stimulation, poor nutrition and toxic stress.
Accurate figures on the number and characteristics of these vulnerable children in Ghana were lacking. A census of residential care facilities and an enumeration of the child population in these facilities were undertaken to address this gap, followed by a survey on a representative sample of such population. This was the most comprehensive data collection effort ever conducted on children in residential care.…
Displaced Children and Orphans Fund (DCOF)/USAID are supporting the efforts of the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP) and UNICEF Ghana to accelerate on-going childcare reform efforts through a 5 year programme, the DCOF/UNICEF/MoGCSP Accelerating Child Care Reform Programme 2015 – 2020. One of the activities is to conduct a comprehensive geographical mapping and analysis of Residential Homes for Children (RHCs) in Ghana to identify the “hot spots” - high concentration of RHCs and/or children in RHCs - and develop a comprehensive…
Abstract
The paper describes the findings of a geographical mapping and analysis of residential care facilities in four regions of Ghana. The mapping exercise study identified 24 residential facilities with 944 children, amounting to 22% of residential facilities and 27% of children in residential facilities in Ghana. Most of the residential facilities were privately run with their budgets funded by international donors. Seventy-five percent of the residential facilities were unlicensed because they did not meet the national standards for residential care facilities. Most of the children…
Sierra Leone is one the world’s poorest countries, ranked 177/177 in 2007 on the Human Development Index and has an estimated population of five million, 51% of whom are children. 11.3% of these children (283,000) are orphans having lost one or both parents as a result of the ten year civil war, low life expectancy in the country, HIV/AIDS and a host of other factors. 20.3% of the child population does not live with their biological parents who are alive.
Poverty coupled with ignorance of children’s rights, many of which are now enacted in the Child Rights Act, poor…