Street Children: A Symptom of Urban Woes
Originally published in Survival, Spring 1994
(Article)

By David Blumenkrantz

A young boy was recently being interviewed by Undugu social workers. His only possession seemed to be an old burlap sack. When asked why he wouldn't put the sack down as they talked, the boy replied warily, "This is not a sack. It is my father and my mother, my house, my car, my farm and my daily bread. I can't steal without it."

Photo by David Blumenkrantz

Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is among the most cosmopolitan and developed cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its city center features glistening skyscrapers of steel and glass; tourists flood the European and American style shopping arcades and restaurants; and a relatively sound infrastructure attracts international investors and media alike, making the "City in the Sun" a banking and communications hub for East and Central Africa.

Yet Nairobi, like many other major towns and cities in Africa and the rest of the developing world, is suffering from urban blight. For decades, the flow of rural-urban migration has continued unabated, with thousands abandoning their pastoral or peasant farming existences, for the lure and promise of city life.

Many of these people end up unemployed and disillusioned. Thus for a majority of Nairobi's nearly 2.5 million inhabitants, life is a day-to-day struggle. Nearly half the people live in sprawling slum settlements on the city's periphery, where clean water, sanitation, nutrition and security are rare commodities.

Spawned from these squalid conditions are the street children, forced by circumstance to take to the streets for survival. Worldwide, there are an estimated 30 million such children, living by their wits in the alleyways and on the avenues of cities such as Sao Paulo, Calcutta and Mexico City. In Nairobi alone, there may be as many as 130,000, though accurate demographics are hard to come by.

It is a sad paradox of modern African life-- where traditional society valued the child as its greatest asset, and children were deemed to belong not to individuals, but to entire communities-- the sight of neglected children roaming the streets, searching for food in dustbins, harassing pedestrians and motorists, sleeping on the street, or under cardboard and polythene structures. The more industrious will collect scrap paper to sell to recyclers, or become "parking boys," guiding cars in and out of parking spots in the city center.

Petty theft, drug abuse and sexual exploitation, often of young girls by local businessmen, are common hazards of street life, as is police harassment. The children are frequently swept off the streets and locked up in dehumanizing conditions, either in remand homes or jail cells. Eventually they are released back onto the streets, hungrier, angrier, and more desperate than ever.

Ask any street child where they would prefer to be, and the answer is virtually unanimous-- in school. It is the inability of the parents--often single mothers with several children-- to afford the cost of schooling, which leads a majority of the children to the streets, to escape the bleak conditions of the slums. Organizations such as the Undugu Society of Kenya, founded in 1973, have created grass-roots education and recreation programs in the slum communities, in an effort to draw the children back off the streets. They offer viable alternatives to street life, but are able to reach only a tiny fraction of the children in need.