Street Children in Ethiopia - Hope Enterprises
Added: February 01, 2008
We speak with children living on the streets of Addis Ababa, the capitol of Ethiopia. To better understand their situation, we meet with the Director of HOPE Enterprises, a group working to help the children survive and make it to college. To help HOPE, visit http://www.hopeenterprises.org/

This video originally uploaded by: http://www.youtube.com/user/devinfoxall

Street Children in Ethiopia - Addis Hiwot
Homeless children & teen in Ethiopia. Addis Hiwot or New Life transforms the life of street children & youth to become productive citizens of Ethiopia. Join the fight against homelessness in Ethiopia. Visit http://www.addishiwot.org/ and contribute.

New Life Teen Challenge Development Program runs 2 rehabilitation centers one for girls and the other for boys including one feeding center where both male and female street children/youth get lunch and counseling services. Both centers have boy and girls attending educational and vocational trainings.

The project site is mainly in 3 sub cities of Addis Ababa region where street life is more prevalent and large population of street people is found. This includes the five towns, Merkato, Piazza, Kazanchiz, Arat Kilo and Stadium.

Originally uploaded by: http://www.youtube.com/nlethiopia

In Ethiopia, an estimated 150,000 children live on the streets. The story of Genet, now living in a safehouse in Addis Ababa, is similar to those of many such children, especially girls.

Photo: David Levene/EveryChild

No images of Genet are included to protect her identity.

My troubles began when I was 14 years old and my mother became too ill to care for my younger sister and me.

We were sent to live with a family as their domestic labourers.

We were both subject to frequent beatings and were not allowed to go to school.

A year later we were taken by our grandmother to live with a distant male relative elsewhere in Addis.

We were told our mother had died and this would now be our home.

It had been horrible with the family we had been living with before and I hoped the new family would be kinder to us now that our mother was gone.

I find it very difficult to talk about my time on the streets of Addis. I survived there as best I could for over two months. State of the World’s Street Children: Violence In pictures: Underground children

But I was forced to go to bed with the male relative who we had been sent to live with and a woman in the household frequently beat us both.

I was pretty sure that the man was also sexually abusing my 11-year-old sister too. After two months I ran away but my younger sister was too frightened to come with me.

I ended up in the house of a family friend who took me in but they demanded that I pay my way by working as their domestic servant.

After being beaten and verbally abused, I decided to take my chances on the streets.

I find it very difficult to talk about my time on the streets of Addis. I survived there as best I could for over two months. I was often very hungry.

The refuge provides a safe space. Photo: David Levene/EveryChildd

Other girls I met living and working on the street told me about the Drop-in Centre for street children operated by the Forum for Street Children.

It took a lot of courage to go there for help as I found it very difficult to trust adults.

But when I told the community workers there what had happened to me they immediately gave me a place in their safe home for girls.

I am now 16, I have started school again and I am being trained at a local health centre as a janitor so I will be able to support myself when the time comes to leave the safe home.

I am desperate to see my sister again. They tell me she has managed to escape from the abusive household we were in and is now living with our grandmother in her home village.

A glimmer of hope in Ethiopia

Ronan Scully GOAL,West of Ireland

There are twice as many Ethiopians hungry today as there were during the 1984 famine when one million people starved.

This uneasy truth means that, every year, up to eight million people, twice the population of Ireland, are starving or die of hunger. Ever since I saw the BBC’s Michael Buerk’s report on the famine and heard Bob Geldof and GOAL’s John O’Shea shouting at the tops of their voices for the international community to wake up to the catastrophe there, I have wanted to work in Africa, especially in Ethiopia. Now, over 20 years later, having now spent many years working for GOAL both at home and in the developing world, I recently got the chance to visit Ethiopia for a second time for work and personal reasons.

The facts of life are depressing in Ethiopia:

Ethiopia receives the most relief aid but the least development aid in the world.

More than 80,000 children die from malaria each year. Untreated mosquito nets cost just €2 and treated mosquito nets cost only €5.

Average life expectancy is 44 years, infant mortality is at 20 per cent and unemployment rests around 80 per cent.

Most of the 75 million people who live in Ethiopia survive on less than 50 cents a day.

There are over seven million orphans and close to half a million street children – witnessing this is enough to make you weep.

Ethiopia is Africa’s oldest independent country and, with the exception of a five-year occupation by Mussolini’s Italy, avoided colonisation. Best known for its droughts, famines and conflict, Ethiopia is surprisingly mountainous and lush. Known as the ceiling of Africa, two-thirds of the country sits on a plateau between 6,000 and 10,000 feet above sea level. Throughout history this rugged terrain shielded Ethiopia from outside influence. Amharic is Ethiopia’s official language, but roughly 70 different other languages and 200 dialects are spoken. The country has its own alphabet, one of only 13 in the world, and its own calendar – this year (1999 in their calendar) they will celebrate the millennium.

GOAL has worked in Ethiopia since 1983 and was well placed to respond to the imploding crisis in the early period. GOAL medical teams worked seven days a week for months on end in very difficult and harrowing conditions on the frontline of the disaster to keep thousands of starving adults and children alive. A massive vaccination programmes for vulnerable communities was implemented and 20,000 families and hundreds of children were fed on a daily basis. Since then GOAL has been helping communities recover their livelihoods after drought and implementing emergency, rehabilitation and development programmes. In an average year, five to six million people seek food aid in poverty-stricken Ethiopia. Our Rapid Response team of experienced GOALies covers large parts of the country with nutrition and health assessments and interventions, to pre-empt hunger hot spots and redress the problem before it escalates into famine. GOAL operates programmes for street children in two of the poorest districts of Ethiopia’s capital city Addis Ababa, providing drop-in centres, healthcare facilities, HIV/AIDS support, meals, counselling, education, sport, washing facilities, recreation activities and beds for over 200 homeless children. GOAL’s child protection programme in Nazareth town offers practical support to poor children and their families. Addis Ababa’s slum dwellings create serious health problems. I saw raw sewage at some of the settlements we visited, most upsettingly at the open spaces where children play – it is often they who are worst affected. Thousands of these children have no homes, no food, no shoes, no clothes and no protection. In order to survive they turn to begging, stealing, prostitution and drug dealing and find themselves condemned as outlaws and socially untouchable.

To live without hope is the most crushing of burdens. At many of the places I visited I saw children with faces that told me they hold no hope for the future. I was reminded of the words of the American writer James Agee, who said: “In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, the potentiality of the human race is born again, and in them too, once more and in each of us, is born again our terrific responsibility towards human life.” Street children have haunted Addis Ababa for decades. Like ghosts they drift through the crowds, eyes glazed from the solvents and drugs they abuse, grimy hands poised to beg or steal. Ignored, pitied and feared they have become part of the city’s decaying infrastructure – like the policemen they bribe and the streets they sleep on, they are the poorest of the poor.

HIV/AIDS is another reason that children end up on the streets. As parents die and relatives prove either unable or unwilling to provide care children are left to fend for themselves. Some street children are involved in high levels of sexual activity and, as the young girls rescued by GOAL told us, many are raped and abused at the hands of older street children and men putting them at risk of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. These children are children only in name. They became adults long before their time, their childhoods stolen from them. In the past decade – the period of greatest wealth creation in Irish history, and the world for that matter – it is now clear that the rich have gained while the poor have only lost.

GOAL tries to give back to these children something of what they have lost. Through the community centre and school for street children, they receive an education, vocational training and job placements. The simplest gift they receive is the opportunity to play. Older children are given the skills needed to set up a small business and GOAL operates a HIV/AIDS programme that provides counselling and health education through drama and peer education. Although I saw much tragedy, sadness and suffering on my trip to Ethiopia, I also met some truly beautiful people – all of them friendly and welcoming. I came away feeling richly blessed to have met them and as though it was me who had been helped, not them.

My thoughts go back to the beautiful young children, cared for by GOAL and many others. I just wonder how many of them might still be there when I visit next. We still have such a long way to go before we come even close to providing children around the world with their most basic rights and needs - freedom from work and hardship, famine, neglect and abuse. In the meantime it is salutary to remember that most of these children do survive. They may be uncomfortable reminders of our malfunctioning society but they nonetheless bear witness to the endurance of the human spirit.

If the international community just learns to listen to the people of Ethiopia, and those who advocate on their behalf, then the most important step will have been taken. For many of these people, and for countless others across sub-Saharan Africa in places like Niger, Uganda, Darfur and Chad, tomorrow will be too late. The work done in Ethiopia and in the 11 other developing world countries in which GOAL currently operates in could not continue without the support of the Irish. We are truly grateful for your generosity and support, not just over the past year but throughout GOAL’s 30 years of existence. Alternatively, if you have a relevant skill and would consider giving at least a year of your life to the service of the poorest of the poor, why not become a GOAL volunteer? For details contact GOAL’s personnel department on 01 280 9779, or see www.goal.ie for details of current vacancies and how to become a GOALie.

The Claremorris GOAL Golf Classic takes place at Claremorris Golf Club on Thursday April 12. Tee off times are available by phoning Claremorris Golf Club on 094 937 1527. The entry fee for a team of four is €180. Book early and support GOAL.

BBC NEWS | In pictures | Underground children | In hiding

Gallery of street children in Addis Ababa.

In hiding Blink and you will miss the underground children in Ethiopia’s capital city. They live in tunnels, sewers and drainage holes, hidden beneath Addis Ababa’s teeming streets. They move from one makeshift shelter to the next, chased away by police or the rivers of water and refuse that flow when the rains come. Growing up amidst the traffic, they learn to hustle at a young age seeking change or selling small items to drivers at traffic lights.

Hidden Across from the main post office, there is a sewage drain. It draws little attention. Thousands of people walk across its steel bars every day without giving it a second thought. This is good for Mohammed and his friends. They do not want their home to be discovered. The space is not more than half a metre high, and though it is five or six metres long, only one small portion is covered and unexposed. When it rains, the boys huddle together among the rubbish and

Crowds Encountering the street kids who live underground is not easy, but once we talked to a few, dozens appeared. As we walked in the shadow of the city’s main buildings, the children emerged from dark side streets and from nowhere at all. Soon we were surrounded by boys.

Hustle For the children who have found shelter, however destitute and impermanent, the difficulties truly begin when they come up from underground and face the realities of their daily life. They must hustle for food scraps, avoid police, and beware exploitation and abuse. Many children perform odd jobs for restaurants and cafés to get bread and leftovers. Sometimes shelters will give out food, and there are soup kitchens that serve cheap meals.

Hana There are fewer girls but they are there. Hana, a 15 year-old, comes from Ziway, a town south of Addis. She left home and came to Addis after an incident in which she accidentally lost her family’s cattle and feared her father’s rage. She hopes to return one day. "Here you don’t have much to worry about," she said. "If you get something to eat, that is good. When you don’t have any, you pass the time either sleeping or chatting with friends."

Sex When they do have money, from begging or doing odd jobs, Hana and her friends often go to the cinema. One of the girls described her attitude to sex. She said that to be safe from both pregnancy and HIV/Aids she always uses a condom. She claimed she did not face serious dangers in this regard, and said no-one had ever forced her to have sex.

Henok Henok Tesfaye came to the streets when he was 11 years old after losing his parents in a car accident. Ten years on, he is used to life on the streets. He lives beneath a main road in an unused hole dug for telephone cables. The roof is made of concrete blocks placed side by side across a small opening. To keep rain out, Henok and his roommate spread plastic sheets underneath old windscreens. A small hole is both the door and the window to their tiny home.

Numbers Among the reasons for the high numbers of street children in Addis Ababa are extreme poverty, hunger, violent conflict and drought in rural areas. Often, the children come without families, orphaned by disease, escaping abusive and neglectful parents, captivated by tales of wealth and opportunity in the big city. An exact number is too difficult to pin down accurately, but various estimates put the total number of street kids in Ethiopia between 60,000 and 150,000.

Dawit As we were talking to Dawit, 12, he eyed a rubber wristband and we gave it him, but the next day it had gone. “It was stolen last night,” he said, crestfallen. “When I was sleeping, someone grabbed my neck and started choking me. They said: ‘Give it to me or I’ll take your life.’ So I gave it them.” He shrugged his shoulders and walked off with a friend down the busy street - unnoticed. Text and pictures: Will Connor and Mesay Berhanu

allAfrica.com: Ethiopia: Town Administration, UNICEF Rehabilitating Street Children

July 24, 2006
Posted to the web July 24, 2006

ENA
Shashemene

The Office of Labour and Social Affairs Office with the Shashemene town administration in Oromia State said that it has been providing support for 442 street children and orphans in cooperation with UNICEF.

Speaking at a relevant consultative meeting organized in Shashemene town, Office Head, Getahun Zewde said that the street children and orphans got access to education with 372,000 birr provided by UNICEF.

The street children and orphans are being provided with educational materials, clothing and other assistances, he added.

Moreover, the office has constructed 79 residential units for 437 homeless families, he said. It has also offered vocational training to 52 youths, the head said.

Town deputy mayor, Feyisa Regasa said on his part that number of street children has been increasing in the town due to escalating social problems.

He urged the public and governmental as well as non-governmental organizations operating in the town to play their due role in the effort to rehabilitate close to 6,000, orphans and street children."

Street kids and philosophy

Blog entry about street children in Addis Ababa.

Things We Should Have Written Down » Blog Archive » Arrive. Make a Scene. Take A Photo. Leave.

I wrote a story a few months ago about street children in Addis Ababa who live underground, in sewage runoffs, in old, unused construction holes, and anywhere else they can find. The story was written for a local magazine that may or may not come out due to license issues. I will post it soon.

Last week a British journalist was in town, and he was referred to me by a mutual acquaintance. He was doing a piece on overpopulation and its many side effects for a prominent UK newspaper. One of the side effects he was interested in was homelessness and street children. The colleague who had worked with me on the original story agreed to come along and introduce him to some of the kids we had met.

We met him at – of course – the Hilton Hotel, one of two hotels that white people stay in upon arrival in Addis. He was accompanied by a British photographer who had two hulking cameras dangling from his neck. I hesitated for a minute and thought that this might be more complicated than I had originally planned. It was.

My colleague and I had taken great pains to approach the street kids sensitively and subtly. We spent several weeks with them, getting to know them and their spots. These two British men were leaving the next day and wanted to get enough material in just a few short hours.

We headed to one of the areas where we knew some kids would be. As soon as we arrived the British journalist started handing out candy. This was not wise. Immediately we were surrounded by at least 30 children. Subtly was no longer an option.

The kids obligingly took us to one of the more dismal locations where they find shelter, in a drainage ditch in the center of the city. The photographer started snapping photos, and the flash attracted even more attention. Now adults as well as children gathered around the area. Some were just curious, others were angry that white people were taking photos of these kids and getting something out of it while the focus of the pictures, the children, were getting nothing. I didn’t disagree. I spoke with a middle-aged woman for some time, and I could not refute many of the claims she made. It was going all wrong.

The main reason I did not want to attract attention is because the Federal Police are notorious for treating street kids inhumanely, and I did not want them to find these kids’ shelter. They would no doubt run them off, and the boys would be in an even worse position.

Then the journalist’s wallet was stolen. He had it in his coat pocket, loose and visible. I did not feel sorry for him. He later told me that he had often worked with street children in Johannesburg and Nairobi and he was very experienced. His actions led me to believe otherwise.

A few minutes later, the Federal Police did in fact show up. I quickly told all the children, especially the ones who actually lived there, to scatter. My colleague was brilliant. He soothed the officers’ tempers and somehow convinced them to leave.

By this point, I had had enough. I told the visiting newspaperman that I was through, that I didn’t feel comfortable with the way things were going. We rode with them back to the hotel, and left as soon as we could.

As an aspiring journalist, I am conflicted about what I saw that night. An ‘accomplished’ writer, with over 15 years of work in Africa, made a circus out of an already sensitive and touchy subject. Is this what I wanted to become? Swoop in to get a story, take a few photos of impoverished children, then escape to the security and whiteness of a four-star hotel?

Ethiopia: Steady increase in street children orphaned by AIDS

© UNICEF video

14-year-old Mandefro Kassa lives on the streets of Bahr Dar, Ethiopia. The country counts one of the largest populations of orphans in the world: 13 per cent of children are missing one or both parents.

By Indrias Getachew

BAHR DAR, Amhara Region, Ethiopia, 20 January 2006 – “The street has been my home since I can remember. It’s been more than one year since I moved here (Bahr Dar) and all this time, I have not seen one good thing about living on the street. Everything is horrible,” says 14-year-old Mandefro Kassa, who grew up as an orphan on the streets of Woreta, a provincial town in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia counts one of the largest populations of orphans in the world: 13 per cent of children throughout the country are missing one or both parents. This represents an estimated 4.6 million children – 800,000 of whom were orphaned by HIV/AIDS.  
 
The country has seen a steady increase in the number of children becoming orphaned because of AIDS. In the past, famine, conflict and other diseases were the main factors that claimed the lives of parents

© UNICEF video

Street children are continuously exposed to various forms of exploitation, including sexual exploitation. They do not have access to basic rights such as access to proper care, education, psychological support and supervision.

Grim statistics

Many street children like Mandefro don’t have access to basic rights such as proper care, education, psychological support and supervision. Often, orphans and other vulnerable children are forced to work to earn an income. They are exposed to various forms of exploitation, including sexual exploitation.

• In Addis Ababa more than 30 per cent of girls aged 10-14 are not living with their parents. Twenty per cent of these 30 per cent have run away from child marriages.

• Twelve per cent of adolescents aged 10-14 – of the 30 per cent not living with their parents – surveyed in two areas of Addis Ababa were domestic workers. They are very young, very vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, and typically have no legal or social support.

• In the Amhara region, the average age of marriage for girls is 14, while at the national level the mean age for marriage is 17.

• There are about 2.5 million children with disabilities.

No social net for vulnerable children

Very few government services help orphans. The primary coping strategy for communities has therefore been the extended family. Increasingly, however, the capacity of the extended family to support the growing numbers of orphans is declining.

“As more and more parents die, the capacity of the extended family to take care of orphans becomes smaller and smaller,” says Björn Ljungqvist, UNICEF Representative in Ethiopia. “In all countries where you have a big HIV/AIDS epidemic, at first you don’t see any orphans at all, as they are absorbed by the traditional systems. And then all of a sudden you seem to reach some type of breaking point and you start finding these children in the streets, you start finding them working in difficult conditions, you start finding even child-headed households.”

© UNICEF video

UNICEF, in partnership with local HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Offices as well as government ministries, is responding to the needs of orphans and vulnerable children in Ethiopia through collaboration with NGOs, youth and community-based organizations.

UNICEF engaged in helping children affected by HIV/AIDS

UNICEF is supporting the rights of children affected by HIV. This includes efforts to alleviate the personal and social impact of the pandemic by ensuring comprehensive care and support to children and families affected by HIV and AIDS.

Strategies include:

• strengthening the capacity of extended families,

• mobilizing and strengthening community and home-based responses,

• strengthening the capacity of children and young people to meet their own needs,

• ensuring the government protects the most vulnerable children and provides essential policies and services,

• creating an enabling environment for HIV and AIDS-affected children and their families.

UNICEF is also trying to reduce children’s vulnerability to HIV by ensuring that they have access to their right to health, education, equality and protection. Children have become the most vulnerable and most prone group to be infected with HIV. This is particularly true of adolescent girls and young women – those aged 15-24 – who constitute between 40 and 50 per cent of all new infections.

Key partnerships

UNICEF, in partnership with federal and regional HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Offices, as well as government ministries, is responding to the needs of orphans and vulnerable children in Ethiopia through collaborations with non-governmental organizations, and youth and community-based organizations.

There are around 10,000 Anti-AIDS Clubs in the country, and UNICEF Ethiopia sees these partnerships as the most efficient way to reach children who are infected or affected by HIV/AIDS.

Sabine Dolan contributed to this report from New York.