01 August 2008
Kids in Need: An NGO Solution
By Christopher Wakiraza
Kids in Need (KIN) is a nongovernmental organization in Uganda that targets children living on the streets and working in the worst forms of child labor. Through district centers in Kampala, Mbale, and Wakiso, Kids in Need provides street children with shelter, counseling, education, medical care, and basic needs, and reintegrates them into society. Kids in Need can point with pride to some 800 once-suffering children that it has taken off the streets and helped to become productive members of their communities.
Christopher Wakiraza founded Kids in Need in 1996, and he continues as its director.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that there are more than 246 million children engaged in labor in the world. Close to 80 million of them are found in sub-Saharan Africa, including my home country of Uganda. Here, children are found working on plantations and in the informal sector, including the commercial sex trade. For the most part, the child laborers in Uganda's informal sector live on the streets.
Professor Mike Munene of Makerere University in Kampala has estimated that in 1995 Uganda had 10,000 street children. Since then, that number has multiplied owing to such social and economic problems in the country as HIV/AIDS, poverty, and internal strife.
ALI AND SSEMBI
Street children are the worst victims of child labor in Uganda. I did not fully understand this until some time in 1996. I was fresh from college and preparing myself to become a college professor. While I was in Kampala City that year, something dramatic happened.
I saw two shabby young boys throwing stones at a car near a well-known car park. This interested me so much that I decided to trail the children. Not very long after, they stopped under a huge mango tree in the city square where idlers spend time dreaming. In a friendly way, I approached them with a greeting to which one responded and the other angrily turned away.
The friendly boy gently told me that he was called Ali and that the other boy was Ssembi. Both were street children who worked for most of the day and night, only resting when there was no threat on their lives. Their usual day started at 3:00 a.m. and ended several minutes after midnight. Ali sold pineapples for a vendor while Ssembi assisted at a shoeshine stall on one of the streets. The two children met in prison, where they had been many times.
Life on the streets has always been unstable for children. With the little money they make, the street children cannot afford one decent meal a day. That is why they are very often involved in crime. And this earns them mob beatings or a jail term. Not surprisingly, Ali and Ssembi had numerous scars as well as fresh wounds on their bodies.
I left the two children, promising to see them some other time.
Little did I know at that time that Ali and Ssembi would lead to the founding of a program for combating child labor among street children. I was deeply troubled to know that some human beings, especially children, were living a life worse than wild beasts. I kept trying to convince myself to forget about the whole scenario, but to no avail. Some aspirations are deeply rooted in the very heart of the human spirit. I could not escape the demanding obligation.
A few days later, when I came to Kampala for personal business, a taxi driver told me there were two dirty children who came every day to the park looking for a man from Entebbe. According to their description, the driver was convinced it was me they were trying to find. So I told him to tell the children that I would meet them on Friday of that week. Since I had a lot of things to do, I left and kept myself busy. It was when I went to have a meal at midday that my worst nightmare came.
THE LIFE OF A STREET CHILD
I started to make the comparison between my meal and the garbage the two hard-working children would be reduced to eating. Two very distinct worlds appeared to me on that day. I immediately decided to look for the boys at their work places. I found that Ssembi had gone back to prison, and Ali had moved in with a dangerous gang to sell drugs and aviation fuel for sniffing. He had become thin, sick, and very miserable.
To survive, each child in the gang had to work very hard. Some provided sex to adults for food or a pittance; others carried heavy loads, sold drugs, or participated in organized crime.
A child living on the streets is in many ways threatened with death. Many such children develop physical complications related to their dangerous work. They are stunted, have rotten limbs, develop tuberculosis, and get frightening ulcerous wounds as well as such common problems as headaches. As a result, they become apathetic. The worst experience of a street child is to fall sick. There is no care, yet he or she has to survive.
Most street children are unable to communicate properly because of drugs. All of them say they cannot do what they do without the influence of drugs. One of them once told me that, tired, he had carried a heavy load five kilometers for a lady who did not pay. Very hungry and desperate that night, he ate human waste, which he found in a bag in a garbage container.
The difficult experiences of Ali and Ssembi led me to investigate the life of street children in Kampala and to live with them. In the following months, with the help of Ali, I started little by little to make the acquaintance of many other children working on the streets. I discovered that each gang had a specific characteristic and location, called a "depot." Many children in the depots did not want to sleep out in the cold, eat garbage, and do painful and hard work. They were frustrated.
With help from the Jesuit fathers in Kampala, a house for 10 street children was rented. Ten children moved into the house with the paper boxes that they had been sleeping on and the polyethylene bags they had used for covering and warmth while on the streets. And thus was born Kids in Need.
KIDS IN NEED
Kids in Need targets children living and working in the streets in Uganda. The program identifies children actively involved in the worst forms of child labor and those who are very likely to become entrapped. Kids in Need today runs three district centers—in Kampala, Mbale, and Wakiso—to provide street children with counseling, formal and non-formal education, medical care, and basic needs. We also carry out advocacy programs aimed at eliminating the worst forms of child labor as a preventive measure. And we have developed and disseminated posters, t-shirts, booklets, games, and brochures while sensitizing the community in our target areas through training and local mobilization.
Children removed from dangerous forms of child labor are placed temporarily in one of the centers for rehabilitation. Then they become involved in gainful activities before they can be reintegrated into society.
Reintegration can take one of three forms. A child who is very young (age 12 and younger) is often returned to live with his or her family if it is still intact. A child who is older or who cannot stay with his family will most often be placed in foster care with his extended family or with a friend. The last form of reintegration is having a child live on his or her own. In this type of reintegration, a child who is 15 years or older and who has learned a skill is given help in acquiring a job and a simple house—often only one room.
Most of the support for reintegration has come from the International Labor Organization's (ILO) International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC), under funding from the U.S. Department of Labor. Other support for food, school fees, medical care, and salaries is provided by the child-focused Terre des Hommes Holland and the development cooperation agency DKA Austria.
In its almost 10 years of existence, Kids in Need has benefited more than 800 suffering Ugandan children, who have gone on to become productive members of their communities. These 800 represent a happy ending to the Kids in Need story. But with thousands of children living and working on Uganda's streets, much of that story is still to be written.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
From the May 2005 edition of eJournal USA
