Mkombozi

What is life like on the streets?

Boys and girls who live and work on the streets are vulnerable to wide and extreme violations of their rights. They have difficulties accessing basic services and are verbally, physically and sexually abused. Few trust adults. Many perpetuate abuse on their weaker peers. Although these boys and girls may have a range of skills related to survival and informal income generation, these strengths remain unarticulated and unrecognised by mainstream society. This combined with the fact that few of them have benefited from sustained formal education means that these children generally find it very difficult to earn money legally. Faced with this situation, many are forced into crime and confrontation with the general public. Significant numbers of these boys and girls seek temporary relief from their situation through substance abuse. They become trapped in a cycle of poverty, violence and abuse. They are socially excluded, highly visible, mobile and increasing in number. They are unable to access basic services - including school - which generates further problems and demands on already overstretched social services and the criminal justice system. As these children age, they run increasing risk of HIV/AIDS and conflict with the law.

What causes children to run to the streets?

A child's departure from home is seldom sudden, despite common conceptions to the contrary. Rather, it usually takes the form of a series of steps in which individuals find out more about the urban environment, investigate work opportunities and make contact with homeless children. Similarly, the factor prompting departure is less commonly a single event than is often thought - rather, it is often a combination of stressors on different causal levels, as suggested in a recent ILO report:

• Immediate: the reason why a child may leave home and go to work or live on the streets could be a sudden drop in family income; loss of support from an adult family member due to illness, death or abandonment; or an episode of domestic violence.
• Underlying: chronic impoverishment, cultural expectations (such as the idea that a boy should go to work on the streets as soon as he is able), desire for consumer goods, or the lure of the city.
• Structural: factors such as development shocks, structural adjustment, regional inequalities and social exclusion.

This multiplicity of levels means that few children are able to perceive all the circumstances that contributed to their decision to leave home. The reasons given by a child on the day of leaving home may anyway be quite different to those they offer three months later after s/he has rationalised his/her home situation and their actions.

What causes children to run to the streets in Tanzania?

Mkombozi's research on child vulnerability in Kilimanjaro Region has shown how income poverty increases familial pressures, which can in turn result in frustration, domestic violence and alcoholism. This, in turn, exacerbates income and non-income poverty within the family. It is this cycle of poverty in its widest sense that serves to exclude families and children from traditional social support networks, and ultimately pushes children and youth to migrate from their homes to urban centres.

Specifically, community members (participating in research conducted by Mkombozi) explain that income poverty is caused by a lack of education and opportunities. Prevailing social attitudes to women and the poor exacerbate this poverty and cause frustration and anger, which in many cases manifests in alcoholism. This then exacerbates income poverty, but also increases dysfunction by catalyzing domestic violence, corporal punishment and abuse within the home environment.

Within Kilimanjaro Region there is also a creeping insinuation that poverty is caused by a deficit within the family concerned (i.e. that they are somehow to blame for it). This is causing impatience and less tolerance amongst teachers, school committees and community members for the consequence of poverty amongst children and a further marginalisation of poor children and their families from traditional support mechanisms within the community. For many poor families and children the only resort to escape such a vicious cycle is to leave the community and to migrate to the streets.

Thus, it must be understood that the reasons children migrate to the streets in Tanzania include immediate, underlying and structural factors:

• Immediate causation: Mkombozi’s Participatory Action Research (PAR) in Kilimanjaro Region has identified that the immediate causation of child migration to the street is conflict. It is a factor within the home environment that frequently pushes children to run away and is endemic in their lives on the streets.
• Underlying causation: In Kilimanjaro Region, underlying factors include:
  – The impact of rural poverty on the family unit, marked increasingly by fathers leaving the family home to look for work and subsequent deepening of familial poverty.
  – The breakdown of familial relationships, marked increasingly by single parenthood, children birthed out of marriage, and death of parents and caregivers.
  – The breakdown of extended family relationships in urban settings, marked increasingly by single parents engaging in “risky behaviours” (e.g. alcoholism, prostitution) and/or working unsuccessfully to try to make ends meet, but leaving children unsupervised during the day.
  – The influx of urban migration, marked increasingly by a growth in “squatter” or “slum” settlements that are characterised by severe overcrowding, ill-health, poverty and violence.
• Structural causation: In Kilimanjaro Region, structural factors include a rapid population increase, an unresponsive employment market, an under resourced educational system, and increased pressures on peasants and increasingly uneconomic smallholdings in the rural sector.

Who are so-called "street children"?

International civil society has a vocabulary used to describe and define the situation of children who reside in the streets, and there are various definitions used to classify them. For instance, UNICEF delineates the following:

• Full-time: A child who lives, sleeps, works and eats on the streets without adult supervision and care - a child "OF the street".
• Part-time: A child who comes to the street environment for part of the day, often to beg or to work as a vendor, and then returns home at night - a child "ON the street".
• "At risk" / vulnerable child: A child who lives in poverty or is a victim of family breakdown and thus is at risk of migrating to the street (full or part-time).

Mkombozi knows that, as much as this vocabulary is useful in interventions and research, we must be careful about it's "shadow sides" and the fact that children who are vulnerable and homeless are stigmatised by the vocabulary used to describe them. By creating an understanding of the reasons WHY children run to the streets, we cast light on the real issues: lack of social protection for youth; lack of investment in youth; the breakdown of Tanzanian traditional systems in a new economic era; the absence of laws that protect young people from the harmful actions of others.

Mkombozi's work is driven at all times by the understanding that each child is an individual with a unique experiences, aspirations and needs. Simply put, the STREETS do not bear children. PEOPLE do. Children on the streets are YOURS and MINE.

Related Mkombozi publications:

• Census 2006: The rhetoric and reality of Tanzania's street children - Social construction of a "problem" masks an urgent need for policies and services for vulnerable youth (PDF 1.3mb)
• Police round-ups of street children in Arusha are unjust and unconstitutional (PDF 357kb)
• Why do children migrate to the streets in Tanzania? (PDF 1.2mb)
• Mkombozi seeks alternatives to residential care (PDF 55kb)
• Street children in Tanzania: A profile and call for action (PPT 121kb)

Related (external) websites/resources:

• The Consortium for Street Children Virtual Library
• Child Rights Information Network
• Human Rights Watch: Street Children
• UNICEF: The State of the World’s Children 2006 (Street Children)
• Street Child Africa