Kumasi, Sept 21, GNA - The Ashanti Network for Street Children (ANSC), a coalition of NGOs engaged in improving lives of street children, on Saturday offered free medical services to 400 street children in the Kumasi metropolis under its health care exercise. The exercise was sponsored under the community poverty reduction programme of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) with support from K. Badu Agro-Chemicals and Freko, managers of the Kejetia lorry park. A team of 25 medical students, who are members of the Christian Mission Resource Foundation, counselled and provided treatment to the street children.

The diseases treated were malaria, body pains and diarrhoea. Speaking at the exercise, Mr George Baffour Owusu-Afriyie, chairman of the ANSC, appealed to the government, philanthropic organisations and individuals to help with the establishment of centres for the resettlement and training of street children in employable skills.

He explained that the lack of jobs and places for such children to "call their homes, have largely contributed to the use of the streets as their places of abode and livelihood".

Mr Owusu-Afriyie also observed that equipping them with employable skills could help reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS and other social vices in the streets.

"Presently since most street children sleep in the open and on pavements, most of them engage in indiscriminate sex facilitating the spread of HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancies", he noted.

Mr Ishmael Opare, President of the Christian Mission Resource Foundation, counselled street children against self-medication since that could be more disastrous to their health.

He especially advised them against illicit sex as it could result in not only unwanted pregnancies but also "be infested with HIV/AIDS which presently has no known cure".