Rescuing, Rehabilitation and Returning Street Children
From:
EDUCATION FOR ALL: THE YEAR 2000 ASSESSMENT: Nigeria
12.2.9 Rescuing, Rehabilitation and Returning Street Children
The Street Children phenomenon in Nigeria is gradually assuming alarming proportions, particularly in urban areas. The immediate cause of this phenomenon appears to be deeply entrenched poverty which defines lives of the vast majority of Nigerians as well as family broken homes. The situation of the Street Children is indeed pitiable but, several Non-governmental Organisations are involved in rescuing rehabilitating and
returning Street Children. The NGOs that have shown considerable interest include the Child Life-Line, Child Project, Galilee Foundation, Kingi Kids, The Friends of the Disabled and the Samaritans. Some of the NGOs are more concerned with the handicapped, others with education, but all have one goal; to rescue the children and give them the chance for a better life.
One of such NGOs is the Child Life-Line [CLL], a voluntary, charitable organisation working for the care for education and rehabilitation of street in Lagos.
CLL was founded in 1994 following a World Bank survey of Out-of School Children, which opened the eyes of some of the researchers to the fact that thousands of children were living and subsisting on the streets of Lagos in appalling squalor.
In 1995, a CLL Survey, assisted by UNESCO funding interviews 608 of these children, including 62 girls. It found that almost all of the children worked for a living-scavenging on the refuse dumps, head-loading and bus conducting, washing-up in bukas (local restaurants) or selling "pure water" on the street. They sleep under bridges, or on market stalls, without access to clean drinking water or soap to wash with without clean and secure place to sleep, without school and without any adult to protect or guild them. Their life is hazardous and there is no way they could escape from the streets. As the Director General of UNESCO Mr. Federico Major, said, "Their only hope is education".
In November 1995 CLL opened its first residential rehabilitation centre for street children in premises loaned to it by the Lagos State Government. Today there are 26 boys aged 8-18 years at any one time resident in the centre. Since its inception fifty-seven boys have passed through the Centre. Of these seventeen have been reunited with their families, fourteen have returned to the street and twenty-six are still in the centre.
Of the boys that are resident at the CLL centre at present, seven are attending school while ten are receiving Basic education in the centre. Two had just finished courses in catering and graphic arts [June 1999].
The considerable success that CLL has achieved in running its own centre, no doubt, emboldened the Organisation to organise in February 1999 a training workshop for NGOs on the management and administration of centres for street children. The workshops was conducted with UNESCO support and hosted by the Van Leer Nigeria Education Trust. The workshop communique` recognised the need for;
- Greater public enlightenment on the centres of the street children phenomenon;
- Counselling on parenting;
- Encouragement for NGOs and community-based organisations to initiate and sustain action to help families in distress whose children are potential victims of destitution;
- Government to resuscitate the almost moribund structures required to meet child welfare needs; to renovate and expand existing institutions and staff them with fully trained child welfare officers;
- Government and NGOs should set up Drop-in Centres, Reception Centres in urban areas to cater for the street children and provide them with nurturing, education and healthcare.
