The Local Government Service and the Department of Social Welfare, with support from the University of Essex, UK, have commenced processes aimed at co-producing, with practitioners, a practitioner-friendly child maintenance checklist to aid in assessment.

Speaking to the media at a workshop on November 24, 2023, in Accra, the Greater Accra Regional Director of the Department of Social Welfare, Anastasia Mawudoku, said it has become necessary for a standardised checklist to be developed to better address issues of child maintenance.

“This is to gather information from practitioners to enable us to develop a checklist that will standardize practice in the field. Thus, to get better outcomes than we are getting now. So this workshop has brought academia and practitioners together to look at our profession and then to provide better service,” she noted.

Addressing the workshop in an opening remark, Dr. Mawudoku expressed hope that the new checklist will, among other things, help bridge the gap between the dependence on cash for child maintenance and material provisions as another avenue of dealing with child maintenance issues.

She, however, called on parents to prioritize the maintenance and welfare of their children above all things and not turn them into victims of marital and relationship disagreements.

In a presentation, Professor Kwabena Frimpong Manso of the University of Ghana Social Work Department highlighted lapses in current practices and the need for the new checklist for practitioners. He further outlined some of the benefits that will be realised from the implementation of a new standardised checklist.

“In doing our research, we identified that while the social workers will concentrate on the monetary aspect, there are other aspects that face families that the social workers do not really concentrate on, which are the physical violence that the children experience because their parents are not maintaining them. There are experiences of aggression and domestic violence between the parents, and also marital discord, which does not allow the parents to unite and be able to provide the children with what they need in terms of their well-being and development.

“So that is the reason why we want to develop a very practitioner-friendly checklist so that when the client comes, they can easily identify all the issues that might be confronting both the children and parents and then, based on that, be able to do an adequate assessment of the issues and put in place interventions which will benefit the children,” he noted.

The workshop saw the participation of social workers across various jurisdictions of the country who brought to bear firsthand experiences, challenges, and knowledge on child maintenance to feed into the development of a standardized checklist.



As part of processes for the development of the standardised checklist, the workshop to gather data from practitioners will be followed by the development of a sample checklist, which will be piloted in selected districts in the Greater Accra Region.

Further details will be gathered from social workers across the country, after which an analysis of the data and the results from the pilot program will inform the development of the final checklist to be made available for use by practitioners.

The project team includes: Dr Ebenezer Cudjoe (University of Essex), Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Manso (University of Ghana), Dr Alhassan Abdullah (Flinders University).

The project is being executed with support from the International Impact Fund through the University of Essex.

The programme is a strategic University of Essex initiative to increase and speed up the beneficial social, economic, policy, and environmental impacts of research around the globe.



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