Human Trafficking in [Zimbabwe] [other countries]Street Children in [Zimbabwe Child Prostitution in [Zimbabwe] [other countries] |
Prevalence, Abuse & Exploitation of Street Children The |
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in ***
FEATURED ARTICLE *** Mandla sleeps under a cardboard box and
survives by scavenging for food from the city’s many overflowing and
evil-smelling rubbish bins. He has only been on the streets for a few weeks
but has learnt quickly, as needs must in this dangerous and disease-ridden
environment. There is no one else to turn to for help. His few surviving
relatives do not even know where he is. On the streets the law of the jungle
operates - literally the survival of the fittest. Frequently it is only rapid
reflexes and a swift pair of feet that keep the inhabitants of this shadowy
world out of really serious trouble. Mandla Mpofu (*) is one of Bulawayo’s
burgeoning number of street kids. He is just eleven years old. ***
ARCHIVES *** UNICEF - The Big Picture U.S.
Dept of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs INCIDENCE
AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - Parliamentary investigation into the situation at camps found that
conditions were poor, trainees were subjected to political indoctrination,
and no real vocational training was being provided. Over the past few years, the number of
children living on the streets has continued to rise and there are reports of
children involved in commercial sexual exploitation. Since the beginning of 2004, many
schools have been forced to increase fees to cover the growing cost of
materials and salaries due to inflation. The fee increases reportedly have
led to a rise in dropout rates, affecting girls disproportionately CURRENT
GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND PROGRAMS TO ELIMINATE THE WORST FORMS OF CHILD LABOR - The government’s “Children in Difficult Circumstances”
program is intended to assist street children. The Program and the Basic Education
Assistance Module provide school fees, uniforms and books for children who
cannot afford to attend school. UNICEF
and other international organizations are assisting with the government’s
education efforts and have been particularly involved in school feeding programs
during the recent food crisis. UNICEF
has also been supplying school-in-a-box kits, which provide basic learning
materials, to children attending satellite schools. Bur of Democracy,
Human Rights & Labor - Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005 CHILDREN - There was no compulsory
education, and schooling was not free. School fees increased dramatically
during the year, and enrollment declined. According to one company's inflation
analysis, school costs for low-income families increased nearly 900 percent
from December 2004 through November. Many families could not afford to send
all of their children to school. According to the 2002 census data and age‑specific
population distributions, roughly 72 percent of school‑age children
attended school. In September President Mugabe claimed that 97 percent of
primary school-age children attended school in 2004. The highest level
achieved by most students was primary level education. There were an estimated 1.3
million HIV/AIDS orphans by year's end, and the number was increasing. The
number of AIDs orphans (including children who lost one as well as both
parents) was about 10 percent of the country's population. Many grandparents
were left to care for the young, and, in some cases, children or adolescents
headed families and were forced to work to survive. AIDS orphans and foster
children were at high risk for child abuse. Some children were forced to turn
to prostitution as a means of income. According to local custom, other family
members inherit before children, leaving many children destitute. Many such
children were unable to obtain birth certificates, which then prevented them
from obtaining social services. During Operation Restore Order,
the government detained many street children and took them to transit camps
or juvenile detention centers. At year's end NGOs were uncertain how the
operation affected the number of children living on the streets, which in
previous years had risen dramatically. Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 1996 [17] The Committee is concerned at
the number of orphans and abandoned children as well as at the increase in
child-headed families, inter alia, as a result of the high incidence of AIDS,
at the inadequate measures taken to ensure the realization of their
fundamental rights and at the lack of alternatives to their
institutionalization. Mandla sleeps under a cardboard box and
survives by scavenging for food from the city’s many overflowing and
evil-smelling rubbish bins. He has only been on the streets for a few weeks
but has learnt quickly, as needs must in this dangerous and disease-ridden
environment. There is no one else to turn to for help. His few surviving
relatives do not even know where he is. On the streets the law of the jungle operates
- literally the survival of the fittest. Frequently it is only rapid reflexes
and a swift pair of feet that keep the inhabitants of this shadowy world out
of really serious trouble. Mandla Mpofu (*) is one of Bulawayo’s
burgeoning number of street kids. He is just eleven years old. Zimbabwe:
Council in Drive to Rehabilitate Street People Mrs Gambiza-Pasipanodya
said the programme involved urging residents,
ratepayers and private organisations to desist from
offering money or material support to street children and adults as this was
a major factor in influencing their continued stay on the streets. Zimbabwe:
Children Need Everyone's Protection THE EXTENT OF THE PROBLEM - There is rapid growth in the
number of orphaned children in Zimbabwe, and it is estimated that by 2010,
more than one third of the children may have lost parents as a result of HIV
and Aids. Others put this figure at one in every five children, which is
indeed cause for concern. It is also estimated that there are currently over
1 million orphans in Zimbabwe and even more worrying, if current trends are
anything to go by, are estimates suggesting that this rapid growth will not
level off until 2030. Also horrifying,
are trends showing an increasing incidence of child-headed households, where
older children have to look after their siblings. Furthermore, the phenomenal
increase in the number of children's homes is evidence of the incapacity of
nuclear and extended families to care for OVC. The worsening phenomenon of street
children in urban areas is also symptomatic of a worsening problem and a
malfunctioning child welfare system. It should be evident to all concerned
about the problem of child welfare, that there are many more
"invisible" children who are not accounted for in official
statistics. Nashville
Agents Give Hope to African Orphans “When I got there, I heard about
this wonderful woman who would bring the street children tea and bread every
morning,” she says. “I expected this benevolent, shining woman to step out of
the shadows to feed the kids, but she was an old woman living in an apartment
that was about to be condemned, barely able to make ends meet. The children
would climb out of storm drains and ditches to get food from her.” Zimbabwe
Police In Roundup Of Harare Street Children And Vendors Police in the Zimbabweean
capital of Harare have been rounding up street children and vendors in an
operation including beatings of those detained, sources said. Unlicensed vendors have been slapped with
fines of Z$40,000 US$0.15) while police have confiscated their goods, the
sources said, noting that previous occasions when such crackdowns have been
in progress goods were auctioned. But the lack of such auctions has lead
observers to conclude that police are keeping the goods. Sources with children's rights organisations said they have not been able to determine
where police have taken the street children that have been rounded up. Food
Experts: Time is Ripe to Grow More Bananas in Zimbabwe Munya is a street child who earns money
by guarding cars in the capital. He says he regularly buys bananas from Chiwkama, because he can afford neither chicken nor
chips. Street
children's project still to fly To date, there are no indications
of any developments relating to a children's home. However, the farm is being
fully utilised. Zimbabwe,
the land of dying children Suffer the little children is a
phrase never far from your mind in today’s Zimbabwe. The horde of painfully
thin street children milling around you at traffic lights is almost the least
of it: in a population now down to 11m or less there are an estimated 1.3m
orphans. Go to one of the overflowing
cemeteries in Bulawayo or Beit
Bridge and you are struck by the long lines of tiny graves for babies and
toddlers. Under the weight of the general
economic meltdown — the economy has shrunk by 40% since 2000 and is still
contracting — the health system has collapsed and a populace now weakened by
five consecutive years of near-starvation dies of things which would never
have been fatal before. A staggering 42,000 women died in childbirth last
year, for example, compared with fewer than 1,000 a decade ago. Children of the streets feel wrath of Mugabe President Robert Mugabe began a new onslaught on Zimbabwe's poor yesterday
when his regime announced that more than 10,000 street children and vagrants
had been "rounded up" in Harare.
Police described their latest assault on the capital's
poverty-stricken street dwellers, codenamed Operation Round Up, as a
crime-fighting measure. Last year they bulldozed thousands
of "illegal structures" in the poorest townships, leaving 700,000
people without homes or livelihoods. Police in Harare on Sunday rounded
up more than 50 street kids in a move meant to combat crime in and around the
city centre. Asst Insp
Pamire said people should desist from giving the
street kids and beggars money because they usually buy intoxicating
beverages, thereby inciting violence and eventually disturbing peace as they
harass the public. The number of children living on
the streets is increasing because of the money they get from people. Street
Kids Unite to Write Book The book, entitled A Zimbabwean
Street Story, was published with the help of German Agro Action, Germany
Embassy, Streets Ahead and United Nations Volunteers, is a story about the
plight of Zimbabwean street children. It tells stories about their everyday
lives and how they became street children. The book asks whether street
children are badly behaved, despised and rejected. It also explores whether
they are safe in the streets, they have dreams and hopes, aspirations to
succeed and above all if at all they choose to be in the streets. The 60-page
book chronicles their life and the story is told first hand by the street
children themselves. Plot
to dump street kids in youth training camps The Harare City Council is
planning to dump more than 7 000 street kids at the controversial national
youth training centres in a sweep likely to be
replicated in other towns and cities. Plans are already at an advanced
stage to forcibly round up beggars and a hardened army of street children,
starting in the capital Harare, as the government battles to stem the spiralling population of street people, sources said. Street Children Vulnerable to AIDS Ten-year-old Molin
considers the streets of Increase
In Street Children As Economy Worsens Results from an assessment of
children living and working on the streets in urban areas around the capital,
Bleak Future
For Zimbabwe's Street Children With the economic crisis showing
no signs of a respite, there was little to cheer, particularly for street
children who have to endure cold nights and starvation in the country's major
cities. Government Establishes Fund for Street Children http://allafrica.com/stories/200507051446.html Government has established the
Children on the Streets Fund meant to protect and rehabilitate children living
or working on the streets and shall be applied for the removal of children
below the age of 18 from the streets for reunification with their families or
placement in institutions dealing with street children. Zimbabwe To Draft
Street Children Into Youth Militia The Femi Kuti Speaks Out For
Zimbabwe’s 1.3 Million Orphans Despite the world’s fourth worst
rate of HIV/AIDS, the highest rise in child mortality of any nation, and the
number of street children doubling in the past five years, Zimbabweans
receive just a fraction of donor funding compared to other countries in their
region. Information
About Street Children - Zimbabwe [DOC] Over 30,000 household headed are
headed by children under 21 and another 3,000 are headed by children under
15; 600,000 children under 15 are estimated to have lost their mother;
estimated 12,000 street children of whom about 5,000 are in Harare; numbers
increase during school holidays and weekends when children are sent out by
their parents to supplement the family income or to earn their school fees
and levies. Tanya: It’s Better to Die of
AIDS Than Hunger ‘Soon after the death of my father
I was evicted from the house where my parents lodged in Mbare. I went to stay with my grandmother who
lives in Mabvuku. There were 10 of us
children staying there and we had all been left by deceased relatives. Life was difficult because, being an old woman, my grandmother had no means of sustaining herself
and all of us at the same time.’ CHILDREN: Those The Anti-AIDS Campaigners Forget Generally, the boys do odd jobs
such as guarding parked cars, while the girls beg. But destitution transforms many children of
both sexes into easy prey for people who sexually exploit them in exchange
for a little money, warm clothes, a pair of old shoes or simply a hot meal. Firelight
Foundation - Grants 2000 – 2003 NEHEMIAH PROJECT, BULAWAYO 2003 – $7,000 - The Nehemiah Project works with
children in Sauerstown, an extremely poor community
outside of Bulawayo. Nehemiah identifies and offers
ongoing outreach to children at risk of becoming street children or runaways. With
this funding, Nehemiah Project supports 140 children living on the streets or in child-headed households
through community outreach and mobilization. They are establishing drop-in
centers where children can obtain food, clothing, counseling, school fees,
and materials. Funds also cover the salaries of two community workers who
visit the children regularly. Finally, they are recruiting community members
to invest in the care and education of children. SCRIPTURE UNION / CHIEDZA STREET
CHILDREN’S PROGRAM, BULAWAYO 2003 –
$5,800 - Scripture
Union, a nondenominational Christian group, has been working with children,
youth, and families in Zimbabwe for 56 years. Their recent interest in street children’s issues has led them
to develop an area of expertise in working with this marginalized population.
Having discovered that many of the children ending up on the streets of the nation’s largest
cities were from two provinces, they began to work with youth in those areas
to prevent them from leaving home. Chiedza is one
of those areas. Firelight funding for Scripture Union’s Chiedza
Street Children’s Program
provides materials for a drop-in center, including clothes, first aid
supplies, toiletries, and equipment. Funds also support administrative costs
and staff allowances. All material used herein
reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial,
nonprofit, and educational use |
Human Trafficking in [Zimbabwe] [other countries]Street Children in [Zimbabwe Child Prostitution in [Zimbabwe] [other countries]