Street Children in Kenya
About 160 million children are fighting for their survival along the streets of the towns in different parts of the world. Kenya is not an exception of this scourge. Though the government is trying to eliminate the problem we still have about 150 000 children on the streets of Kenya. About 3000 of them are located in the fourth largest town Nakuru. Several reasons make them end up in the streets. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has struck Kenya more than we dare to imagine. According to estimations 1 out of 5 of the adults are infected. That means every Kenyan citizen are either infected or affected. In Kenya 700 persons die every day in HIV related diseases which has led to that 50% of the population is under 15 years old. Many children are left behind to a life in poverty and sometimes also without anybody to take care of them. About 20% of the children we have met in the streets are orphans, mainly because of HIV/AIDS. Though many of the orphans are taken care of by relatives, many of them end up in the streets. But HIV/AIDS is not the only reasons pushing children to the streets. We have experienced that almost all children have somewhere they call home, usually where the parents or some relatives stay. The reason why they decide to leave that home is very individual but there are some common reasons like poverty, whereby the child sometimes act as a breadwinner, sexual abuse or other kinds of abuse, drug abuse at home, lack of parental care, broken families, idleness and pear pressure.
There are three types of street kids:
- Those who stay at home and occasionally goes to school but spend most of the free time in the streets, mostly begging for money for the family.
- Those who have little or no school experience. They spend all days in the street and also some nights there but visit their homes more or less regularly.
- Those who stay fully in the streets and visit their homes very rarely. Some of them spend years in the streets without visiting home.
For further reading we recomend you:
Children Rights in KenyaStreet Children in KenyaHuman Rights Watch - HIV/AIDS in Kenya Centre for Disease Control - HIV/AIDS in KenyaANNPPCAN[
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