Tamale, May 13, GNA - Mr Stephen Sumani Nayina, Northern Regional Minister, has appealed to groups working to combat child trafficking in the country to join efforts in order to effectively tackle the problem. He said the development and protection of children was paramount in nation building and stressed the need for integrated commitment to promote their interest to enable them to attain their full potentials. Mr. Nayina made the appeal in Tamale on Tuesday in a speech read on his behalf at a workshop on child trafficking. The workshop was on "Good practices and lessons learnt under Lutrena 1", an ILO/IPEC initiative, to address child trafficking issues in West Africa.

The purpose of the two-day programme was to assist LUTRENA staff and stakeholders to disseminate good practices and lessons learnt from the project since the inception of the programme in Ghana in 2003. Mr. Nayina said trafficking in children was widely practiced in West and Central Africa, even though the exact number of cases was not known. He said child trafficking was on the ascendancy with high incidence recorded in the Northern Region, which recorded 332,664 trafficked children in 2003 alone.

He said harsh economic factors, unemployment, under employment and inadequate income from poor harvests and natural disasters, accounted for the rural-urban migration, which needed to be addressed. Dr Margaret Sackey, National Programme Coordinator of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), said the Lutrena project was helping to eliminate child trafficking from five selected districts in Northern and Upper East regions. This is being done through improved capacity building for schools to monitor 2,500 vulnerable children, implemented by the Regional Advisory Integrated Network Systems (RAINS), a Tamale-based NGO. She called for stronger ties with government and other bodies involved in children's issues to address the canker and that there was need for economic reintegration of parents and children in neighbouring countries with the necessary tools to equip them with employable skills.