Afrikids, a Child Rights NGO, has partnered with the media and members of academia to mark the Africa Safer Internet Day (ASID). The Africa Safer Internet Day was a general discussion by all African International Telecommunication Union (ITU) members’ states to begin to champion the Celebration of the Day within the continent effective 2020. This enables the choice of theme for the celebration to take on board the peculiar and diverse needs of the continent.
Speaking on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East, the External Affairs Manager, Raymond Ayinne said the ASID is important because it provides a platform for stakeholders to have conversations around safety for children on the internet and focus on drawing up workable solutions for same.
Mr. Ayinne continued to say that it is important to mark the Day as it draws the attention of parents and guardians to the need to take conscious efforts to protect the innocence of their children or wards on the internet. He admitted that the internet has become a part of society, thus there is a pressing need to create support systems that allow children to navigate through the internet with relative ease while also avoiding needless information.
For this reason, a radio discussion was held to inform the public about the Day. Raymond Ayinne was joined by the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Officer at Afrikids, Daniel Kpabitey and the Head of the ICT Department at the C.K Tedam University for Technology and Applied Sciences (CKT-UTAS).
He said celebrating the Africa Safer Internet Day forms part of Afrikids’ priority areas. The priority areas, he said are health, education and child protection.
“So this ASID falls under child protection. We want to ensure that the children are protected and safe from harm. In the midst of COVID and the fact that at a point during the pandemic, we were looking at how we can use online learning to compensate for the loss of school contact hours”.
“We quickly realized that children are very vulnerable. We saw the risk and the exposure that the children can be put through when they used mobile phones, laptops or desktop computers or any of those devices to access the internet,” he said.
A1Radioonline.com|101.1MHz| Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Bolgatanga|Ghana
