Growing Street children - Opportunity to review Uganda’s situation

Uganda is today commemorating the International Day for Street Children under the theme ‘Participation’ which is encouraging the community to give street children and be child-focussed, enabling them to have a key part in all areas of service provision. The day, according to the United Nations’ website provides a platform for the millions of street children around the world and their champions to speak out so that their rights.

Uganda has one of the youngest and fast growing populations in the world. With children constituting 56% of the population and an annual population growth rate of 3.2%, the demographic and developmental significance of children and young people in the country cannot be overemphasized. 

The ratification of the United Nations Conventions and other domestic legislation like the 2009 Prevention of Trafficking in person’s Act and the Children’s Act Cap 59 that protect the rights of a child, champion child justice and down trod child sexual exploitation have not made much change in the situation at hand.

Oketch* 15 years was forced to live on the street after home became unbearable.  With his father occasionally denying him food over petty ‘sins’ like failure to fetch water and brush his shoes, concentration at school became a night mare. What was more traumatic however was his seeing his mother being beaten occasionally.

“Life became so unbearable for me at home it compelled me to leave and look for other survival alternatives in 2011,” he says.

However, life was tougher; he often went hungry and because he could not speak Luganda that other children did as he was a langi. He failed to find a place to sleep as many had their ‘official’ occupants and thus he was often isolated.

However, after three weeks of traversing the street and eating off rubbish pits, he found a Langi friend, also a street child who helped him sell his shoes for food and find safer places to sleep and work. This friend also helped him fit into a group and find work. Oketch worked collecting empty water bottles and scrap.

He said: “Sometimes the money I had worked for the whole day would be taken by other children as we slept.”

He also faced poor treatment by other people, with people calling him unpleasant names and suspecting him of crime.

Then one night, outreach workers from Retrak picked them up and took up in the drop-in centre for rehabilitation. Retrak is a UK based charity that works with street children in Africa to give them alternatives to life on the street. Oketch and his friend now attend regularly and he has been empowered through peer to peer education.

Moses Kabagambe, Executive Director of the I’ll be there foundation says observers that an alarming number of young children in Uganda are surviving on the country’s streets; foraging for scraps of food, begging, stealing or doing the menial jobs. The foundation aims at ending suffering and poverty of street children in Uganda

“Many children are forced onto the street because they were abandoned by their families who couldn’t look after them and others because they were orphaned through AIDS,” he says.

Poverty, family breakups and parental deaths are the foremost reason for the increase in the number of street children. According to the 2011 Uganda Demographic Health Survey (UDHS), there are an estimated 1.2 million orphans due to AIDS deaths.

James Kaboggoza, the assistant commissioner for children in ministry of Gender said many of the street children in Kampala are from Karamoja region and Napak District and are here because they have been trafficked.

“Some of these business men and women go to those regions, convince their parents that they are going to get their children better jobs in Kampala and instead make them beg for money on the streets,” he said during the launch of the 3^rd Tumaini awards in Kampala on Tuesday.  

This year’s theme of the Tumaini awards is “Eliminating harmful social and cultural practices affecting children: our collective responsibility.”

Kaboggoza called for the involvement of all stakeholders including government, non-governmental organizations and donor agencies to solve the issue of street children and harmful socio-cultural traditional practices like female genital mutilation, early marriage and child sacrifice affecting children.

The theme for last year’s International Day for Street Children was ‘challenging perceptions.’