Editing and cartoons for UNICEF Ghana
By Elizabeth Willmott-Harrop
21 September 2015
The Government of Ghana with support from UNICEF commissioned a 156 page national baseline study on child protection and produced a new 39 page Child and Family Welfare Policy based on the findings.
I recently edited these documents into user-friendly versions, producing a 44 page reader friendly summary of the research and a 16 page child-friendly flyer for the policy.
As part of the writing and editing project I was asked to conceptualise illustrations to demonstrate key points in both documents. Below are a selection of the cartoons I produced and how they appeared in the publications after being professionally drawn by the designer.
The new research along with other studies, revealed that while children in Ghana often live in closely-connected families where members of the extended family participate in their care and protection, child maltreatment is assuming worrying heights.
Corporal punishment, domestic violence, sexual abuse, sexual violence and exploitation are prevalent. Other challenges are child labour and child trafficking, children living and/or working on the streets, child marriage, female genital mutilation/cutting and the trokosi system of ritual enslavement which persist in certain regions of the country.
Birth registration – an important pre-requisite for the protection of children both in terms of welfare services and in cases of justice – is still not reaching all children in Ghana.
