When Begging Becomes a Profession

Ghana’s quest to realize the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), whose ultimate aim is to end extreme poverty, attain zero hunger, good health and wellbeing may not be achieved due to the absence of adequate social protection systems to cater to street children.

An overwhelming number of children including foreigners, as young as two to five years, position themselves at major traffic intersections of Accra to beg for money from motorists.

Many of them are driven onto the streets by their parents, mostly mothers, to beg for money from motorists, passengers and other members of society to keep themselves fed.

Most children find themselves on the streets due to a number of reasons such as poverty, religion and uncontrolled rural-urban migration.
Some of them use crude means to demand money by knocking on car doors and glass windows, while others climb onto the tyres of vehicles to demand money.

One of them I came across lamented, “I came here with my brother. He left me at the Tema station and I became a street boy. I was trying to follow him but I didn’t see my brother again. I sleep at ‘Kanta’. This work does not produce a lot of money. You can stand here from morning to evening and you get only 10cedis. I want to eat. The clothes to wear. A lot of challenges are on the streets,” he noted.

I also spoke to Suleiman, another beggar from Niger who has no source of livelihood and therefore has to beg to raise money to send to his siblings in Niger.
“We don’t have any work doing. I have to beg to be able to eat. My father keeps some of the money I make so we can send to our siblings in Niger,” he stated.

Abu, who was brought to Ghana by his brother Suleiman with the expectation that the beggars’ business in Ghana was big, expressed the difficulty in finding meals in a day.
“Getting to eat a meal just a day is very difficult. My brother brought me to Ghana to beg because we believe it is lucrative in Ghana” he indicated.

Telling the challenge they have using the roads loaded with beggars, one driver said the tendency of knocking down a beggar is high especially when a vehicle’s brakes fail. He, therefore, called on the government to do something about the issue.

“It is not good at all. If the break of the car fails, it does not hit another vehicle. It goes to knock the human being and kills him. It is a serious bother to us. We always say it. They go and come every day and it has become a daily business they do. So we are pleading with the government to take them out of the streets and put them somewhere or take them to their parents,” the driver expressed.

Another driver was of the opinion that ideally, the young beggars should have been in school questioning if authorities have plans towards that or have other alternatives.

“My main concern is for the beggars. You see a lot of children and I feel these children should be in school. So if we are taking them off the streets, are we going to take them to schools? What are we going to do with them?” she quizzed.

A driver at a lorry station also recounted an incident where a passenger was attacked and a mobile phone stolen, by a supposed beggar
“The last time, armed robbers came to attack a passenger here. The victim was a Ghanaian. He pulled a gun and took away the victim’s mobile phone” he said.

The various Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies and their departments of social welfare, are responsible for getting beggars, especially child beggars off the streets, but are resources and homes for the upkeep of homeless and vulnerable children available to these authorities?

Has the government shirked its responsibility of working towards the attainment of sustainable development goals 1, 2 and 3?

In 1998, Ghana harmonized its child care legislation to conform to the Convention on the Rights of the Child by enacting the Children’s Act 1998, Act 560.

The Act was meant to among other things, reform and consolidate the law relating to children, provide for the rights of the child in relation to maintenance and adoption and also regulate child labour and apprenticeship.

In Ghana, child maintenance is recognized as a mandatory parental obligation enforced by the Department of Social Welfare, however the limited financial and logistical support to the department has made it almost impossible for it to cater for the welfare of street children, most of whom are products of broken homes.