Mrs. Angelina Baiden-Amissah, Deputy Minister in charge of Pre-Tertiary Education has announced an internal repatriation strategy to send back all young migrants who have travelled from rural areas to Accra in search of greener pastures.

The strategy entails identifying migrants on the streets of Accra, interviewing them and immediately handing them over to drivers for transportation back home.

For Hon Baiden-Amissah, the strategy is the best way to deter young people from migrating to the urban areas when they could be in school back home.

Hon Baiden-Amissah said this during a national durbar held in Accra to lower the curtain on the just-ended 2008 Global Action Week (GAW), a world wide campaign on education.

It was the same forum at which she declared that government will continue to provide school uniforms to only 'poor but brilliant' primary school pupils as a means of ensuring primary education for all.

She recalled an instance where she gave money to a hawker to return to home after the hawker had confessed being stranded in Accra after coming to Accra without the knowledge of the parents.

"Later, I regretted not taking this person to the station myself because it is unlikely he went," she said.

Consequently, she indicated that henceforth, she would drive such children to the appropriate lorry station and hand them over to a driver for transportation to their places of origin.

In the past, however, there had been suggestions that rural-urban migration could be curtailed once the push factors were addressed.

Not long ago, Dr. Mariama Awumbila, Director, Centre for Migration Studies, while reviewing the history of migration in Ghana, pointed out that a national migration policy should take into account the prime challenge of how to tackle the main push factors for migration - poverty and the lack of job opportunities in Ghana.

Then, at the launching of the 2008 GAW, Naa Prof John S. Nabila, Wulugunaba and Member of the National House of Chiefs said lack of quality education among the three northern regions has led to wider migration proportions.

According to him, the lack of quality education has even driven women, who were formerly not associated with migration, to become the ones leading the rural-urban drift.

Also, it has been proposed that government should develop the sheanut and sheabutter industries in northern Ghana to discourage migration of young girls to the south in pursuit of greener pastures.

This was contained in a report of a study released in connection with the World Aids Day which fell on Dec 1 2007. The study focused on the migration of children and teenagers from the North to the South.

The study, conducted by a group of researchers at the University of Ghana pointed out that "It is possible that if the sheanuts and sheabutter industry is given special attention, it could be a more lucrative source of income for the young girls and make migration to the South less attractive to them."