Founding

The Sports & Cultural Academy For Street Children (The Street Academy) was established in November 1986 by Ataa Lartey, a sport enthusiast and social worker as a youth programme to hunt untapped talents in sports and cultural activities.


Change of focus

Initial studies conducted showed that most of these children were living on the street.

Also The Street Academy realised that a large number of children between tender ages of 6 and 15 years, live on the streets of Accra, the capital city of Ghana, and have to work as porters or sweepers in the market before being able to eat. Such painful deprivation and abuse of the children’s right necessitated The Street Academy to concentrate its efforts on caring for these deprived children.

In most communities, peer pressure, poverty and illiteracy among other factors, encourage teenage girls to give birth at early stages and some do have several children from different men before they attain the age of twenty years. Most of them do not know their fathers and others might have their mothers sick or dead. There are about 50,000 of such children to be found in Accra alone.


Registration as NGO

The programme’s focus was therefore changed in 1993 to care for children. The Street Academy registered with the Registrar General of Ghana as a non-governmental organisation (NGO) the same year.


Recognitions

The Street Academy is recognised as a street children project by the following organisations.

1.        Ghana National Commission on Children
2.        Accra Metropolitan Assembly
3.        Department of Social Welfare
4.        Response
5.        Ministry of Education, Non-Formal Education Unit
6.        Ministry for youth and sports
7.        National Service Secretariat
8.        National Sports Council