4th October, 2010
The Lagos State government is making frantic efforts to rid the state of street urchins and children who roam the streets selling things.
The state is doing this in partnership with the United Nations Children Education Fund (UNICEF) in order to make the plan effective.
The UNICEF, Child Projection Specialist in Lagos State, Mrs. Roseline Akinroye, who represented the international organisation, stated this at the opening of a three-day stakeholders forum on half way transit home for street children in Lagos.
Akinroye explained that UNICEF was involved in the project based on the awareness that street children constituted a major problem to the development of Lagos State.
According to her: “What we are trying to do is to support the state government to have a system in place whereby issues of street children will be adequately and promptly addressed.
“We have pocket of intervention here and there but we want to achieve a system such that once a child is identified on the street, any good citizen of LagosState will know what best to do to get that child back to school.â€
While listing broken homes, poverty and the quest for independence as reasons responsible for children on the street, she tasked government on proper implementation of policies and programmes aimed at assisting street children as this alone makes the problem history.
The State Commissioner for Women Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Mrs Joke Orelope-Adefulire, while speaking on the need to take children off the streets, said the move was aimed at ensuring that these children, mostly underage are sent back to school rather than engage in street trading and hawking.
The commissioner, represented by the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Mrs Riskat Akiyode, lamented that such situation had lured many children into crime, adding that a programme would be established to ensure the success of the programme.
She explained that Lagos daily witnesses high influx of children from both within and outside the country, noting that a lot of programmes have been formulated to effectively ensure that no child in the state is on the street during school hours.
She listed the programmes to include the Child Act Law and distribution of yellow card where people reached the government to report any case affecting children.