Rights group Amnesty International (AI) Ghana and the Women in Slums Economic Empowerment (WISEEP), an NGO, are appealing to the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and the Government of Ghana to stay an intended eviction of dwellers of the sprawling Agbogbloshie slums. They say city authorities on December 1 and 7 drove megaphone-mounted vehicles through the slums announcing a December 14 ultimatum for dwellers to vacate the area and pull down their dwellings or be forcefully evicted to pave way for the redevelopment of Ghana’s railway system. The two bodies, while commending the government for initiating plans to develop the area with the ultimate objective of improving the lot of the citizenry, say the forced evictions, if carried out without interventions to assuage the harsh effects associated with such exercises, will negate all expected benefits. They therefore are imploring the government, the metropolitan assembly and the railway authorities to tarry a while and contribute to the resettlement of the many thousands of dwellers whose already deplorable living conditions in the slums would only be worsened by the exercise. At a press conference Saturday to appeal to the authorities to consider forced ejections as a very last resort to claiming the land (because all other means may have failed or are not workable), Messrs Lawrence Amesu, Director of Amnesty International Ghana and Mr. Frederick Opoku, Director of WISEEP said they were concerned about the negative consequences of forced evictions when they happen unplanned. Among other negatives, the two organizations said forced evictions could lead to increased exposure to gender-based violence such as acts of physical and sexual abuse as well as harassment of women and girls in the affected communities, increased social vices such as prostitution and increased vulnerability to the deadly HIV/AIDS disease and other sexually related diseases, increased school drop-outs as parents are traumatized and especially when they lose their sources of income and therefore cannot cater for their children's education, plus increased streetism with its attendant social vices. “We wish to draw the attention of the government to its avowed commitment to slum upgrading as spelt out on page 85 of its 2008 manifesto which recognizes the fact that slum existence is the results of rural - urban migration, limited supply of land and regulatory framework that fail to address the needs of the urban poor, of which the rail dwellers are no exception.”