On a busy morning in Tamale you see the city’s usual stir traders setting up, tricycle popularly known as yellow yellow threading through traffic, and workers hurrying to work places  but one sight haunts many residents: women carrying newborn twins, moving from passerby to passerby with outstretched hands. For those who watch, it feels like a moral crisis; for the mothers, it is often the anguished outcome of poverty, broken social supports and conflicting cultural pressures.

A survival strategy, not a choice
For many of these women, begging with twins is a last resort. Single mothers, abandoned partners, widows and households trapped in chronic poverty find themselves with two mouths to feed when even one is a stretch. Where formal employment, social protection and family supports are unavailable or unreliable, public spaces become the only place to secure immediate food and small cash donations. That the children are twins compounds the pressure: feeding, healthcare and the time required for care are all doubled, pushing already vulnerable caregivers into routes that would be unthinkable in more secure circumstances.

Culture, custom and commercialisation
The phenomenon cannot be understood without appreciating local belief systems. In parts of northern Ghana, twins carry layered meanings  reverence, spiritual caution and sometimes expectations that women should perform public acts to secure blessings for the children. Historically, practices around twins may have been embedded in community reciprocity. Today, however, the practice is distorted: what might once have been a communal duty to help has, in many cases, become a commercialised spectacle that some actors exploit and a survival tactic for desperate families. That shift turns culture into a cover for structural failure: where collective protection erodes, superstition can be manipulated and poverty becomes ritualised.

Child protection and rights at stake
The sight of infants exposed to sun and traffic for hours is not merely uncomfortable, it raises serious child‑protection issues. Prolonged street presence undermines nutrition, exposes children to disease and accidents and interrupts early childhood development. Ghana’s constitution and children’s laws enshrine protections that should render such practices unacceptable; yet enforcement, outreach and effective social-welfare alternatives remain patchy. The result is that rights on paper do not always translate into real safeguards for the youngest and most vulnerable.

Policy gaps and practical fixes
This problem sits at the intersection of social protection, maternal and child health, education and local governance. Addressing it requires more than public disapproval or ad‑hoc charity:

- Strengthen social safety nets: Targeted cash transfers, emergency allowances for new mothers and faster access to maternal‑child health services would remove the immediate pressure that pushes caregivers onto the streets.
- Expand community‑based support: District assemblies, health workers and local NGOs can identify at‑risk mothers early, offering counselling, nutrition support and referrals to skills training or low‑interest microcredit.
- Tackle harmful practices through respectful dialogue: Where cultural beliefs drive behaviour, interventions must be community‑led and respectful of traditions while promoting alternatives that protect children and their caregivers.
- Improve livelihoods and women’s economic inclusion: Vocational training, guaranteed market linkages for small enterprises and female‑friendly job programmes reduce the economic drivers of street begging.
- Enforce child‑protection laws with compassion: Where intervention is needed, authorities should prioritise safe alternatives family tracing, kinship care, or community shelters rather than punitive measures that criminalise poverty.

A moral test for society
The presence of twins on Tamale’s streets is not merely a local problem; it is a mirror that reflects failures across institutions social protection, health, labour markets and community solidarity. Removing children from public begging requires a blend of immediate relief and long‑term investment: cash support and food aid today, livelihoods and educational access tomorrow. It also demands that leaders, traditional authorities and civil society collaborate to restore the communal safety nets that once protected vulnerable families.

Beyond charity: dignity and agency
Charity alone will not solve this problem. What mothers need is dignity predictable income, reliable healthcare for their children and the social acceptance to pursue work or training without fear of stigma. That means policies that treat caregivers not as objects of pity, but as partners in rebuilding household resilience. It also means amplifying local organisations already working in Tamale to register, mentor and support these families so that public spaces are no longer their only option.

The image of twins in the dusk of Tamale’s streets should trouble us all. It is a visible symptom of deeper structural neglect: fragile social protection, gaps in maternal and child services, gendered poverty and the erosion of communal supports. Ghana has the institutions, laws and compassionate traditions to do better. The test now is whether policymakers, traditional leaders and communities will match indignation with sustained action and restore to those mothers and babies the basic protections and dignity they deserve. By Mariam Alhassan 

Author is a student journalist and Radio Tamale newsroom staff