Poverty and AIDS forces children onto streets

Pint-sized Edgar was 10 when he left his mother’s shack in eastern Zambia to seek his fortune in Lusaka, the bustling capital of 1.3 million people. The puny but plucky youngster had no inkling about life in the city, but he was not perturbed. Nothing, he thought, could be worse than the miserable life he had led in Lundazi. It was an existence of few pleasures and endless chores. From morning, when he hauled several bucketfuls of water from a communal well half a kilometre away, to midnight, when the neighbourhood tavern at which he tried to sell his mother’s hard-boiled eggs closed, the little boy knew no respite. When business was slow, his mother held him personally responsible and whipped him or denied him his supper, or both. Two years on, Edgar has given up the quest for his fortune. He starts his day in the central business district, where he alternatively begs and runs errands to raise enough money for the imperative dose of “glue” – an intoxicating concoction of petrol and adhesives that the destitute sniff to dull the harsh realities of life on the streets. At midday, he walks over to Fountain of Hope, a non-governmental organisation outside the city centre that rehabilitates street children, for a free meal. Edgar’s life, multiplied many times over, represents the lot of thousands of the children that swarm the streets of Lusaka in a desperate quest for survival. Their number has risen markedly over the past few years, doubling to 75,000 since 1991. The conventional wisdom is that the increase in their number is a direct consequence of HIV/AIDS. It is generally assumed that most of the children are forced onto the streets by poverty after one or both of their parents died of AIDS-related complications. According to the ministry of health, Zambia had around 520,000 AIDS orphans in 1999. That number is expected to rise to 895,000 by 2009 and to 974,000 by 2014. “Perhaps half of all street children are orphaned children, indicating growing pressures on extended families to cope with the rapidly increasing orphan population,” the ministry said in a report entitled ‘HIV/AIDS in Zambia’. However, new evidence suggests the HIV/AIDS pandemic is not necessarily the main reason that a growing number of Zambian children are living on the streets. To begin with, around half of the 75,000 street children in Lusaka are not orphans. Moreover, recent studies have revealed the lot of Zambian children with parents is no different from that of orphaned ones. “There is little difference in economic status between orphan and non-orphan children. Seventy-five percent of orphan children are found in households living below the poverty line and 73 percent of non-orphan children are also living in households below the poverty line,” the government’s 1999 Situational Analysis of Orphans and Vulnerable Children points out. “These problems (of food shortages, poor health, inadequate education and bedding) actually affect all the children, orphan and non-orphan, and indeed, all the community members,” the report added. Moreover, there is a growing realisation that poverty is not the only factor that forces children to live on the streets. That, at least, has been the experience of Foundation of Hope, which deals with an average 500 street children per day, providing them with food, schooling and shelter. “A lot of other factors besides poverty, including psychological pressures, force children to leave their homes. Some leave to escape abuse of one sort or another, and others are compelled to go on the streets by peer pressure,” Fountain of Hope administrative officer Emmanuel Mukanda told IRIN. According to Mukanda, children who leave their homes for reasons other than economic pressure tend to be more difficult to rehabilitate than those forced on the streets by poverty. “Those children who ran away from home often require intensive counselling. The others, who are forced onto the streets by poverty, are relatively easy to reform. Once their basic material needs are met, their main problems are over,” he said. The realisation that many children end up on the streets because of psychological pressures prompted Fountain of Hope to extend its counselling services to the parents of runaway children. “Many parents come here to look for their missing children, and we try to counsel them along with the children. Sometimes, we succeed in bridging their differences, and the children return home,” said Mukanda. Observers, including the government and UNICEF, see the misconception that destitution among Zambian children is largely AIDS-related as sometimes diverting communities away from effective interventions. They argue that while the plight of orphan and non-orphan poor children is broadly similar, their specific needs can be different. “There is ... value in distinguishing between orphans and other vulnerable children when considering psychological support, protection of rights, interventions targeted to their specific status as orphans and epidemiological surveys,” notes the government’s Situational Analysis of Orphans and Vulnerable Children. Moreover, Zambia, a country of 10 million people, has 19 non-governmental organisations whose core missions are to alleviate the plight of AIDS orphans. Few such organisations exist to address the concerns of destitute non-orphan children. However, there are signs that society is beginning to appreciate the fact that the problem of destitute children goes beyond AIDS orphans. “Although communities start by looking at the needs of orphans, they soon reformulate their criteria to include other vulnerable children, namely those who are extremely poor,” UNICEF notes in a report entitled, ‘Children Orphaned by AIDS’. To access the UNICEF report go to: http://www.unicef.org/pubsgen/aids/