Remove children from the streets

Samson Muradzikwa
There was a case reported by the media not so long ago about a girl from Murehwa who had travelled to Chitungwiza to collect school fees from her grandmother.
Finding no one at home, she decided to venture out onto the streets since she did not know anyone else in Harare. On the first night, she was sexually abused by adults at the place where she slept.
Two points are striking about this case. Firstly, that anyone in our society could sexually abuse a vulnerable young girl rather than help out speaks volumes about our attitudes towards this abhorrent behaviour. Secondly, the streets are becoming an increasingly attractive option for desperate children!

There are few comprehensive studies on children living and working on the streets in Zimbabwean urban areas.
Most of the evidence is anecdotal, with estimates ranging between 6 000 and 9 000 children.

Harare, (including Chitungwiza, Epworth, Norton and Ruwa), accounts for more than half of them while the rest are in the major cities of Bulawayo, Mutare, Gweru and the border towns.

Whatever the numbers, the fact is that children living on the streets are a sad reality and something urgent needs to be done.
These children are a heterogeneous population that can be categorised into three main groups: those who come from poor, urban homes; those who come to the streets to work in order to supplement their families’ income and who return home at night; and those for whom the street is the main living place and whose family ties are remote.

Anecdotal information points to poverty and violence against children as the major factors driving children away from home.

From a social perspective, the persistence of the problem is primarily a manifestation of the breakdown of the family support system due to various socio-economic reasons.

Efforts to address the growing numbers of children on the streets have generally failed to address the structural cause of the problem, which revolves around urban poverty, growing urban unemployment, HIV and AIDS, economic hardships, the breakdown of the extended family system, and other related factors.

Responses have tended to focus more on removing the children from the streets through raids and round-ups, with very limited success.
The failure of such approaches has mainly been because the children are viewed as a problem that needs to be addressed. The push factors are rarely the object of focus.

There is no doubt that children living and working on the streets are being denied their rights as laid out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which spells out a wide range of rights for all children including the right to dignity, survival, and development, and freedom from discrimination, harmful influences, abuse and exploitation.

The CRC states that the State is obliged to provide special protection for a child deprived of the family environment and to ensure that appropriate family care or institutional placement is available.

It is the right of every child to have a standard of living adequate for his or her physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.
The solutions to getting children off the street are not simple but they work.

The Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare and local councils need to work together to identify and reintegrate these children using a network of community-based Community Child Care Workers and partnerships with key civil society organizations offering specialist services for separated children.

The existing framework for the identification, documentation, tracing and reunification process will play a key role in providing a standard approach to addressing issues of children on the streets.

Once placed with either biological, extended or formal foster families, other social protection mechanisms are expected to be operational in order to address the poverty dynamic.

Social protection programmes such as cash transfers can support families to better provide for their most basic needs, the absence of which in most cases pushes children to the streets. Importantly, the Ministry of Social Welfare has established procedures that people who would like to foster children can follow.

The normal point of entry for applications is through the social welfare departments at the district level.

Samson Muradzikwa is Chief of Social Policy at UNICEF Zimbabwe.