Over at Pa Pa Paa LIVE, the interactive webcast service we run with Comic Relief, we've got a special webcast up to celebrate International Day of the African Child on Tuesday 16th June.
We hope that it highlights the sort of aspirations young people in Africa have for their futures; free from poverty and full of opportunities.
International Day of the African Child has been celebrated on 16th June every year since the end of Apartheid in 1991. It honours the thousands of black schoolchildren who took to the streets during the Soweto Uprising of 1976 to protest about the inferior quality of their education, and draws attention to the lives of African children today.
In this webcast, the children from a Fairtrade cocoa growing district in rural Ghana discuss their career aspirations, mentioning professions including footballer, doctor, cocoa farmer, pastor, and journalist. They consider the lengthy training needed to become a qualified doctor and the cost of attending university. One pupil talks about moving to Accra, the capital of Ghana, while another prefers to stay in the countryside and be a cocoa farmer like his parents. One boy would like to have ten children, and intends to pay for them by becoming a pilot!
The children have just finished filming this unedited webcast themselves, and it's been inspiring to see them gradually get better at producing them. It's one in an ongoing series of webcasts providing a child-eye view of Ghanaian life available to schools on subscription.
