Millennium Development Goals - "They Are about Children!"

UNICEF staff saw the development of the booklet as a unique opportunity to involve children in their work. Unofficially named the UNICEF “Ghana Kids United”, or GKU, a group of children started meeting on Saturdays in the UNICEF House garden to discuss the Goals, and their importance and relevance to Ghana. On a series of visits to public schools arranged by the Ghana Education Service, they spoke to Upper Primary and Junior Secondary School classes about exactly what the Goals meant for the world, and their country. The schoolchildren were encouraged to discuss with the GKU group their ideas about what needs to be done in Ghana to achieve the MDGs. At the end of the GKU “lesson”, the schoolchildren each chose a Goal and created a drawing about how the relevance of that Goal to their daily lives. The drawings are being used to illustrate the booklet, so that the Goals will be presented through the eyes of children.

The drawings capture the essence of many of the challenges facing Ghana in achieving the MDGs, and vary in their content significantly by region. For example, in the Eastern Region, not far from Accra, children drawing illustrations of MDG #3 (promote gender equality & empower women) drew female and male doctors. In the Northern Region, boys drew pictures of brothers helping their sisters fetch water for the same Goal to illustrate that girls should not be kept out of school through overburdening them with household chores.

Using the ideas and illustrations of Ghanaian children aims to help young people understand how the Goals directly affect their lives, and to communicate the fact that Goals represent promises made by the world to children. The text of the booklet was written to make the goals clear, country-specific, and action-oriented. This included re-writing some of the goals themselves. For example, MDG #2 (achieve universal primary education) was changed to “Make sure all children go to primary school, stay there and learn.”

Designed to empower and inform, the booklet explains each Goal, followed by a discussion of the challenges of achieving the Goal and section on “What needs to be done?”. At the end is a section in which children can check “Is your country on track?”, filled with facts about Ghana’s progress on the MDGs. The booklet includes lists of suggestions of concrete steps that children in Ghana can take towards the realisations of the goals. UNICEF hopes that, once published, the booklet will further encourage children in Ghana to take action on the MDGs, either by making their voices heard politically or within their own communities. Suggestions include ideas like writing a letter to a newspaper about taking care of the environment, making sure that you and other children in your family sleep under bednets to prevent malaria, and becoming an HIV/AIDS peer educator.

Children.

This initiative is based on the conviction that the MDGs represent important commitments to children and that, therefore, strategies for achieving the MDGs should be developed with the input of children. UNICEF believes that, ultimately, the participation of children will be essential in achieving the MDGs, and that encouraging children to play an active role will also aid Ghana’s development. However, the complexity of the issues highlighted by the MDGs means that children are too often left out of the discussion. Creating awareness of the objectives of the goals is the first step towards getting children involved - both so that they can take their own actions towards realising the goals, and so they can let the world know what the goals mean to them.