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[23 April 2012] - With reports of more than 54 thousand children on the streets of Accura, many claim that they left their village for a better life and now find themselves engaged in harmful child labour to survive. Many of the children who left their home villages were lured to the national capital from the poorest regions by agents who promised them that they would be taken care of and paid well. However, many of the street children interviewed stated that their lives and the conditions they were forced to live in on the street were horrible. Child labour has been rising substantially in Ghana due in large part to economic growth, especially in the city of Accra. Child rights advocates claim that Ghana has comprehensive laws in place to protect children and prohibits the use of underage workers, but they remain largely unenforced. As a result, according to Ghana’s Department of Social Welfare, the number of street children in Accra went from 21,000 in 2007 to more than 54,000 last year in 2011. Anti Child Labour Campaigners fear that as the nation’s economy continues to expand, children in Ghana will continue to be exploited to meet the economic growth and need for cheap labour. Many of the children do harmful jobs such as working as porters, which involves carrying heavy loads all day around the city. But, for many, carrying loads in the streets of Accra is often not their only means of survival. Investigations by local organizations revealed that at night, many of them serve as commercial sex workers in the city’s biggest slum. Child rights campaigner, Bright Appiah, claimed that “The reason why there are many children in the streets is because the family system is failing children so they move out to seek refuge in the streets. We need a comprehensive child protection system to deal with the problem”. The main issue, as stated by Stephen Adongo, head of the Ghana’s Social Welfare Department, is that the department’s social workers have too much work and too little central government resources to adequately respond to the needs of street children, much less to stop the problem from continuing to grow.