The regional director of the DRMFFE in Gôh is outraged by the exploitation of minors and plans to launch an awareness campaign to protect them.
Child exploitation: The regional director of women, family and children will initiate an awareness campaign. For some time now, children have been seen in the streets of the municipality of Gagnoa, sometimes stationed at various intersections or near traffic lights, offering items to passengers.
Others do it by wandering the neighborhoods, especially in densely populated areas. Aged 5 to 16, they roam the streets all day selling drugs.
As for the small-time shoe shiners, they can sometimes be found in coffee kiosks or near government offices approaching employees to shine their shoes for 100 FCFA.
The majority of these teenagers are found on the streets with the complicity of parents who encourage them to go and get money to provide for themselves or for their low-income family.
"I sell tissues by the roadside to earn money and give what I earn as profit to my dad to pay for my supplies and also to eat at home," says 16-year-old Traoré Seydou.
The same is true for Fatim Koné, whose mother wakes up early in the morning to go and sell her goods and returns late at night.
Faced with this situation, Ms. Kouakou N'dri Charlotte Lydi, regional director of the DRMFFE of Gôh, told the press that she plans to undertake a vast awareness campaign to show the dangers these minors face, but also to make parents understand that children are protected by law.
"We have observed these facts at the management level and I would say that we are against this because Ivorian law indicates that a child can be put into apprenticeship from the age of 14 in the presence of an adult, unfortunately this is not the case," she said.
According to the regional director, these children have already been identified in the various neighborhoods and sites where they carry out this trade.
To this end, an awareness session is planned for soon in order to make parents understand the risk to which they expose their children by allowing them to be in the street unsupervised with all the vehicles that are circulating.
A platform has been set up which includes communities, the police, the gendarmerie, the child protection service and the regional human rights commission to carry out this fight over a long period.
To succeed in this mission, Ms. Kouakou N'dri Charlotte Lydi plans to plead with local authorities to help them have the means of mobility to approach parents in the neighborhoods, telling them that their children do not belong in the street.
Jacques Doukrou / © Gagnoa.net
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