I’m now in Lusaka, Zambia, home to CRED Partners Aaron and Josephine and their ministry ‘Full Proof Mission’. The main arm of this ministry, and the arm that CRED has most involvement with, is their work with street children in seeking to support those who live on the streets for various reasons and also helping children get off the streets and back home.
Tomorrow I’ll be visiting the projects in action, but today we sat and had a very insightful conversation about the current realities of working with street children. There are many reasons that the children end up on the streets, but the main ones are poverty, family breakdown, or issues relating to the lack of relationship between child and step-parent. This is often exacerbated when a new baby is born to the parent of the child and the step-parent; at that time sadly children from previous relationships can often be thrown out.
So, for various reasons, the child ends up on the streets, very vulnerable, traumatised and at risk of exploitation. It is at this time that there needs to be some well-planned, child-focused initiatives to immediately provide support and safety for the child. Chisomo tries to provide this through its outreach and drop-in programme (more of that another day), but unfortunately there are very few other agencies doing similar.
The police approach is more likely to beat the child and send them running, so that the child quickly becomes fearful of approaching the service that is supposed to provide protection. The government attitude tends to be to do intermittent ‘round up’s’ of the children – gathering them all into a truck, and taking them to a facility to be ‘processed’. Occasionally being processed does result in a child being reunited with home, but sadly the majority just end up spending a bit of time in the facility and then being released and returning to the streets.
I asked if there are any long-term strategies in place to try and solve the problems that are leading to children running to the streets in the first place. For example, support for parents re parenting skills; access to food parcels and educational support; other poverty reduction initiatives. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the answer was no, not really. There are some organisations that distribute food to those in particular need, and there are some charities (including Chisomo) that cover education fees for children on their books. But they are few and far between. And whilst the underlying causes for children going to the streets are not being addressed, the numbers will continue to grow.
Apparently two years ago the number of children on the streets was declining, which was very encouraging to see. But then Zambia, as with many other countries in the world, was hit by the perfect storm of reduced internal food harvest, increased food prices on the world market, increased fuel prices, and still trying to recover from Covid pandemic. Cost of living went up, poverty levels went up, and numbers of children on the streets went up.
It would be very easy to feel totally overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, and think that nothing can be done that will make any impact. But, just like the starfish story when the child saved one starfish at a time, so we can each do our little bit, and those little bits all add up. Chisomo is doing exactly that – not being overwhelmed by the enormity of the issue, but one child at a time, doing their bit to improve the lives of the vulnerable in their midst.
I’m looking forward to meeting some of those children tomorrow whose lives have been improved, and I thank God for Chisomo, for Aaron and Josephine and the rest of the team who are forging ahead doing what they can to make the world a better place, one child at a time.
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