When british film director Chri Rhys Howarth first came to kenya in 2008, he came to work. But when he landed, he instantly fell in love with Kenya and decided to stay and use his craft to help transform lives …

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With such a move on the horizon, and with many schools already closed in the area, it is understandable that the affected teachers are not able or willing to work under such a cloud of fear until additional security measures are put in place. However, in the long term, it is the children themselves that are disturbed most significantly and such moves historically have long-lasting effects not seen by many.

It was just under a year ago in Thika when, in a similar vein, 6,000 teachers in the area were advised not to go to work by their Union Officials in a row of pay, and such a demonstration, irrespective of its own merits, had far-reaching effects on our work at AfCiC. With schools closing and with many of poorest children unable to eat having previously relied on school feeding programmes, Thika and the surrounding areas saw a huge influx of children coming to the street.

Once children are on the street, living a life of apparent freedom can seem so appealing in comparison to the order, discipline and relative structure of school and home, and once there, can often be very hard to pull away from, even with NGO’s such as AfCiC working with them and for them. The draw of making their own money through either begging or informal work (such as collecting scrap metal or carrying bags, luggage and shopping) and often the use and subsequent addiction to glue or ‘musi’, can make this move away from street life very difficult for the child. We at AfCiC see this tussle every day when boys we work with, when given the opportunity to come to our rehabilitation centre (Interim Care Centre) for 6-8 months, choose the streets instead, often purely because of the addiction they have built up, and their struggle to pull away from that.

So it is on this basis that we base much of our education empowerment work – on the belief that prevention through education is the key instrument to seeing a long-term street-child free town, and hopefully building a model which can be replicated elsewhere.

We operate a School Dropout Prevention Programme (SDPP), designed to identify those children most at risk in coming to the streets, and responding to that risk before they do. This process takes a number of forms;

• School feeding programmes, operating in 3 local schools and where over 1500 children are provided with well-cooked and nutritious meals every day.
• Payment for school uniforms, desk fees and equipment, an amount of money that, even with the provision of ‘free primary school’, can be prohibitive to many children and their families.
• Child Sponsorship, a programme that allows us to place children who cannot be supported by their family in either boarding or day schools when the ‘free’ option is not appropriate. In addition to helping children go to primary school, through the help of donors, we facilitate access for some children into secondary schools – schools that always require fees – fees which are unaffordable to most children and their families.
• Holiday clubs in each school holiday, designed to provide an alternative activity at a time when many children, without regular school and a meal each day, head to the street for food, money and entertainment.
• Advocacy work, where AfCiC staff go into local schools in the to help children and teachers alike to understand and participate in debate in issues such as child rights, child abuse, HIV/Aids and parental responsibilities. Through Child Rights Clubs in local schools, we have reached over 4000 children as a way of increasing child participation in these matters, and have widened child access to education.
• Teacher training, where we work with teachers to help them understand and identify when a child is most at risk to going to the street, and what they can do to help prevent that situation.

Even with these tools, ‘education empowerment’ doesn’t always have to focus on what we traditionally see as the home of education: a school. Whilst children are the focus of our work, it would be negligent of us to disregard parents and communities, individuals who are at the root of why children come to the street, and are arguably the stakeholders with the most power to prevent a child’s first transition from school to street.

Street children are, in many ways, just the fruit of a bad tree, with the root of that tree being the households, communities and wider society from which they come. Poverty, in whatever form, means many households cannot afford to provide their children with basic food and shelter, and a lack of education on HIV/Aids and protection, as well as a culture of large families, means planning ahead financially for extended families does not happen. Many parents, man, woman or both, are dogged by alcoholism, and child abuse, whether mental, physical, sexual, or through neglect, is common in families, and provides even more incentive for children to leave a dysfunctional home for a similarly dysfunctional life on the street.

Education focussing on these stakeholders is equally, if not more, important as educating our children, and we work with community leaders and many parents to help them change their situations, often by creating small businesses that they can hopefully sustain in the future.

On a wider scale, the problems we see here in Thika and Kenya are not new – they are problems that are duplicated across the developing world. The 2^nd Millennium Development Goal (MDG) (as a whole group they are a set of goals aimed at bringing a focus to 8 key issues of development by 2015) is focussed on Education, specifically that every child across the world should have access to free primary school education. The UN have noted that enrolment in primary education in developing regions reach 90% in 2010, up from 82% in 1999, though in 2010,  they also note that 61 million children of primary school age were out of school, with more than half of these children (33 million) coming from sub-Saharan Africa.

However, what they fail to note is that even with the provision of primary school education, free or not, there are many hidden barriers to children actually taking up that offering, and that Education has to be focussed on more than just teaching in schools, if we are to move to a time when children are not ‘pushed’ to the streets due to a lack of care and basic provision in their family and community.

Whether or not teachers in the Garissa area strike or not, and that choice will still affect children in some way, in the long-run it is a holistic view of education, focussing not solely on children, that will help families and communities take up their responsibility of care for the children in their charge, and in the long-term, see children at-risk of going to the street find care and support much closer to home.

I write this, then, having just come back from Burundi, having left Kenya after nearly 5 months working with AfCiC in Thika. During that time, I was able to see a group of nearly 25 boys, formerly from the street, grow in confidence and contentment as they completed the final 4 months of their time at AfCiC’s Interim Care Centre (ICC), a residential rehabilitation centre for street children. It’s worth noting that for these boys, I didn’t see them when they were on the street, nor when they first arrived at the ICC, a notoriously difficult time!

The ICC is used as a temporary home for these children, helping them in the first instance to provide regular shelter and food, but also to overcome the frequent addiction many of the boys have to glue or ‘musi’, a petrol-based drug. In the longer term, the ICC also provides education in various forms, from the more commonly seen English, Maths, Ki-Swahili and Science, to the lesser seen but, for street boys, equally important, dancing, acrobatics, drama, music and martial arts.

On the whole, my experience with these boys was hugely positive and, as they graduated just before Christmas last year, everyone was very hopefully that these boys would be a success back with their families, with whom AfCiC had worked in the intervening period, and would be able to strive back in school, albeit to varying degrees given the natural swing of educational capabilities.

At the same time, I was also working quite closely with a lot of the boys who were currently on the street at that time, and was particularly excited when many of these boys were selected in the new intake for the ICC, just before I left for Burundi. It was exciting to see these boys who I had seen on the streets, addicted to glue, come to the ICC, put on a new uniform, get their haircut, get clean, and I particularly remember on their first day being with them when they saw their beds, complete with 3 blankets each, and the excitement plastered all over their faces.

It was easy from this first 5 months in Thika working with these boys to see what a difference AfCiC, and thereby street-child focussed organisations, can make in the lives of children so different to the ones I see each day in the UK, as well as my own.

Fast forward 3 months and I have returned to Thika and have been struck by some startling revelations – revelations that many have probably had before, but only now make sense to me having seen children I grew close to affected.

One example that illustrates this is a boy called Matthew (not real name), a boy I first met at AfCiC’s OPVC (Outreach Prevention for Vulnerable Children), and outreach centre in the heart of one of Thika’s poorest areas. It was in my first week in Thika, back in October, and whilst I didn’t really relate to him more than any others at that particularly time, I remember more vividly the time he was subsequently admitted to the ICC as a rescue case, it having later emerged he had suffered some quite serious sexual abuse from a member of his wider family. He was quite visibly traumatised and shaken, with one out-playing of his internal pain being a very tactile behaviour towards me (I can’t speak for any other staff members here), something I remember being very uncomfortable with and made an effort to curb.

Over time, and with rehabilitation and a lot of care from staff, he grew back into a more confident and happy boy. He was clearly very intelligent, extremely helpful around the centre with cleaning and cooking, and I grew particularly close to him when all the other boys from the ICC went home to families for a week at Christmas as a trial period, whilst Matthew stayed at the centre, and I went and saw him and another boy every day, if nothing else just to stay busy as I also found being so far away from my own home at Christmas quite hard.

It then gave me great pleasure when just before I left to travel to Burundi, Matthew was admitted into a school near his home, and with some of the problems with his family seemingly fixed, it was on my return to Thika 3 months later that I looked forward to seeing him again, visiting him at his school and maybe seeing his home.

However, what I found on my first morning in Thika town was that he had very recently gone back to the streets, had started taking glue, and was looking quite ill looking worse than I had seen him for many months.

Having met with him and another two members of AfCiC staff, it turns out that whilst he very much enjoyed being at school, it was when he returned to his home where he had problems, and it was this breakdown in his family, caused by a new relationship his mother was having, that saw him return to street life.

In a similarly disappointing vein, I also returned to Thika to see a collection of the boys who were admitted to the new intake at the ICC back on the street, back taking glue, and many seemingly in an even worse state than they were 3 months ago, even before they were admitted to the ICC.

As I previously said, the revelations I got from these experiences were ones many people have had before, and it is on this foundation that much of the work of AfCiC is based. The revelations I had pointed me to the fact that however much work you do with the child, and however much work you put into their rehabilitation and education, unless the families and communities to which they are returned are able to positively cope with them, the work you put into the child is rendered useless.

Similarly, particularly in respect of the boys who left the ICC, largely due to withdrawal symptoms to glue, the boys and girls we work with need to be active participants in change. Change doesn’t just happen to these children – we cannot just turn a switch on and they are suddenly changed – they need to want to change. They need to be active participants rather than just passive observers.

A positive example of a boy who wanted to change is Antony, a member of the last intake at the ICC, and now living back with his mother and new fiancé, whilst attending school every day. Antony was always visibly bright and intelligent, and even though he lives in an unbelievably tiny two-room home with his Mum, Mum’s fiancé and young baby, he is determined to have a better future – a future intimated to in a video put together by AfCiC centred on Love and Forgiveness. Even with that determination to not return to life on the street, it is still the responsibility of AfCiC not to see Antony as a ‘success story’, but rather as a work in progress and someone with whom we should be working, like many others, for many years, rather than just seeing a return to family and school as the end of the process.

What this past week, and the preceding months on which I have reflected, has done is show again that these individuals stories are just small symptoms of a much wider issue. In a meeting before Christmas, the AfCiC Director, John Muiruri, pointed to the analogy of a tree in explaining that street children are simply the fruit, albeit tainted in some way, of a rotten tree. Even the tree itself, representing the families and communities from which they came, is sometimes powerless to control the fruit being produced, as it is at the root where the damage is done.

This root is the same root that pervades developing countries throughout the world, and for me makes it easier to understand the role that global organisations like the UN have to play in tackling what for me seemed like a million miles away from New York or Geneva or London. How could an organisation like the UN really have an impact on Matthew’s or Antony’s future? Do Matthew and Antony really see a difference in their lives when somebody in the US or UK goes before a meeting of wealthy businessmen and talks about the importance of the ‘Millennium Development Goals’?

But the answer is in some way, yes, as much as it’s very hard to see in the day-to-day life here in Thika, and for these boys. What I have found hard to get my head round is that there are thousands of Matthew’s and Antony’s all across Africa and Asia and South America, even in Europe, Australasia and North America, and whilst I would love to see the UN come down to Thika, spend lots of money and time on ‘fixing the problem’ here, it really isn’t conceivable or practical!

To get to the root of the problem, thereby preventing boys and girls down the line from even coming to the street in the first place, organisations like the UN have to mobilise important people, whole countries and other global organisations, to agree to tackle global issues on health, education, ‘poverty’, hunger, and the environment, which in the long-term will see a difference for future Matthew and future Antony. I, like many, often struggle to see the effect of long-term goals, and often prefer to see the short-term gains which are easier to comprehend though, in reality, are often without substance and long-term benefit.

There is obviously no reason why AfCiC and similar organisations cannot also look at the root causes of why children come to the street, and many, including AfCiC, do exactly that. Increased training and dialogue with the community these children come from and a family sponsorship programme, designed to give families a means to provide for their children, are both important tools AfCiC uses in focussing on ‘prevention’ of street children rather ‘reaction to’ as the key to keeping children in prosperous family units and schools, and its only really now that I begin to understand how important these long-term plans are.

In the future, AfCiC want to be able to train and educate more people; children, families and communities alike; in issues such as Child Rights, in HIV/Aids awareness, in understanding the role of Government and the Constitution, and in many more similar areas. This training will, in the long-term, build the capacity of these individuals and groups to care for their children and not just relinquish responsibility to concerned individuals and local NGO’s to do that job for them. It’s been an interesting 9 months; hugely valuable and eye-opening, but certainly not one with a short-term happy ending.

AfCiC in its work has recognized that the virtue of home being the streets increases vulnerability to disease and abuse. It is a growing concern to the global public health community since street children phenomenon is an increasing problem in most cosmopolitan cities of the country, including Thika, which is a fast growing industrial town.

According to AfCiC Street Census 2011, the number stood at 113 boys and 20 girls. It is therefore important to have a clear presentation of their health problems in an attempt to intervene and rescue these children. The street children in the census reported all five types of abuse: general abuse and neglect, health abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse, and sexual abuse. Verbal and psychological abuses were reported the most. Older children and children with higher income abuse the younger children and children with lower incomes, respectively.

Street children have high incidence of diseases and there are several factors determining occurrence of disease amongst them. Sexually transmitted infections are the order of the day given the fact that some of the older children take advantage of the young ones and abuse them sexually. As the lead way to HIV/AIDS, non treatment of STDS has also given rise to HIV infections in the streets.

Interestingly, upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) is common due to cold exposure as well as dump site smoke which provoke Tuberculosis (T.B). This has become a worrying trend in Thika town and to the country due to the emergence of Multidrug resistant T.B (MDR) due to non adherence to T.B drugs.

 Drug abuse is rampant among the street children in Thika which include glue inhaling, petrol (solvent), cannabis, cigarettes smoking among others hard drugs. Other than URTI’s, burns have been experienced amongst the users as these solvents are highly flammable. Rarely do the children get medical attention due to the numbness resulting as a result of drug use.

Lack of sanitation in bathing, toilets, and water also contributes to poor health leading to environmental concern. Outbreak of dysentery, a bacterial parasite which causes an inflammatory disorder of the lower intestinal tract often affects street children. Most of the street children in Thika lack access to medical care, which is especially detrimental during times of illness or injury.

Children rights to health cannot be attained if some children continue to call the streets home with the above mentioned health problems and challenges. We are calling for governments and society to join together and stand up for the rights of street children all over the world.

As the World celebrates the International Women’s Day, Action for Children in Conflict joins millions and millions of voiceless Women who may be may not even be aware of the celebrations are taking place across the globe. AfCiC wishes to reflect on the situation of Women in Kenya focusing on the life of an ordinary woman in Thika. However we would want to look at education, health, water and access to justice with a view of bring out the true picture of an ordinary peri-urban woman in Kenya

According to the Kenya Bureau of Statistics, there exist serious gender disparities in the country. In North Eastern Province Gross Enrolment Rate for girls is 29% compared to 112% in Western Province. In Nairobi’s informal settlements only 22% of 15 to 17 year old girls were enrolled in school compared to 68% nationally and 73% in rural areas. Furthermore, in a country filled with cultural norms, girls in many communities are still seen as homemakers who do not deserve to go to school and are subject to female genital mutilation among other forms of violence. Extreme poverty and hunger continues to cripple many women in the slums and rural areas reducing possibilities for women to enjoy any opportunity that comes their way including the free primary education. With the little resources that some families have, they prefer to send their boys to school since it is believed that they are future wealth sources to their parents than the girls, as they will go on to be breadwinners.

With no information and right to negotiate safe sex, women continue to carry the burden of HIV/AIDS with millions dying for lack of essential life prolonging drugs like ARV’s and poor diet. Action for Children in Conflict through its work with communities in Central Kenya have identified a very worrying trend where elderly mothers have taken up the responsibility of taking care of their grandchildren, sometimes as many as 12 children all below 8 years, These category of women is most traumatized and burdened by HIV and AIDS, they are unable even to meet the very basic nutrition since there is never enough food in the house. Furthermore the very elderly and weak women have gone back to doing hard labor in local farms and quarries to feed the orphans. The situation is worse with younger women of reproductive health age whose inability to assert their sexual rights continue to be exploited by men and exposed health risks over and above HIV and AIDS. This includes denial of opportunity for visiting the hospital since every time they go out they have to get permission from their spouse resulting in the women missing out on existing services like family planning and other essential screening that would easily keep away diseases like cervical cancer away.

It will be acknowledged that Kenya has very good laws from the Constitution of Kenya 2010 which provides for a wide range of opportunities for protection and development of women. However the story is different when it comes to implementation, women will unlikely have the opportunity to succeed their deceased husband, have a say in the domestic budgets and in some places women will not even own property in their names. In most instances women will instantly be evicted from their matrimonial homes when their husbands die, sometimes even before the burial takes place. The most dominant areas of discrimination are concerned with laws on inheritance, sexual and gender based violence. At this point let us go through the life of Anne

Anne Akinyi is is a happy joyous 35 years old mother of seven children and a resident of Kiandutu slums in Thika forty minutes drive north of Nairobi the capital city of Kenya. Ann ‘s parents migrated to Thika almost fifty years ago when the town known then as the Birmingham of Kenya due to its very vibrant industries that not only kept the economy of Kenya thriving but also employed thousands of workers from across the East Africa region.

Well, Thika as an industrial giant in East Africa is a story of the past save for just two or three factories that keep going despite the economic meltdown. What remains to witness the good times that have since gone are empty factories, some that can be said to be dangerous since they have been left unattended including the chemicals that were being in use.

However, while the ghostly shells of factories are a worrying reminder of the past, the abandoned mothers; parents of hundreds of vulnerable children are a source of concern. As we celebrate the International Women’s Day, a thought for Ann and hundreds of women like her who live in extremely hard circumstances is in order. Life is a daily struggle to Ann, as she tries to eke a living from nothing barely getting enough to feed her children. With limited education Ann does not have access to family planning or any reproductive health education. She actually lives the day as it comes and hope for a better tomorrow, the question is will tomorrow come for Ann. At one point in her life Anne was happily married with a lot of support from her husband, extended family and friends. However the passing on of the husband from what then was referred to as a curse disease resulted in her being kicked out of the matrimonial home together with her five children, she has since gotten another two children through other associations while trying to go back to a stable family.

While Ann suffered the pain of being evicted from a home she had put together with her husband the pain of losing all the property they had jointly gotten together with the husband is very evident in her face. However the most frustrating part is when her children cannot go to school because of very basic requirements like uniforms and her children sleeping without food days on the end. In the meantime the stigma and harassment by the community because she is single, is her biggest problem and brings her down to a point of desiring to leave the world. We celebrate Ann and many other women who like her struggle through-out their lives to make a living not for themselves but for the sake of children and society. Action for Children in Conflict wishes to continue investing in the wellbeing of women like Anne, by making life more bearable through organization, trainings, linking up the women with essential services and including medical and small business development opportunities.

At AfCiC, we feel it is hugely important that our work is not without direction and strategy. Whilst to some extent, the work we do is as a response to the local situation; one where children from a very young age, for a whole variety of reasons, take to the street and experience physical, mental and sexual abuse, with no shelter, no love and no care; we also know that by working in a sheltered manner, directed purely by the situation we see right in front of us, we would not be able to provide best practice, we would not be able to link our work to that of other NGO’s in Kenya, in Africa and beyond, and we would not be able to look at ourselves in the context of wider needs and problems.

One focus of our work in recent years has been the Millennium Development Goals. In September 2000, “building upon a decade of major United Nations (UN) conferences and summits, world leaders came together…to adopt the UN Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to new global partnerships to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets – with a deadline of 2015 – that have become known as the Millennium Developments Goals” (www.un.org).

The MDG’s are a set of 8 targets which range from “halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education”, and each of these targets, if met, would greatly decrease the number of children going to the streets in Thika and the surrounding towns. The issue of street children is not as easily solved as ‘halving extreme poverty’, or meeting any other of these MDG’s, but what these goals do achieve is to galvanise the strategies and efforts of continents, the countries within those continents, and the organisations and people within those countries who are in positions where they can help in their own small way. The MDG’s also help organisations like AfCiC to understand the issues facing children, their families and their communities, in a global context.

For example, MDG 2, relating to providing universal primary education for all, has had huge consequences in Kenya, and most notably for AfCiC, in Thika. Whilst not necessarily linked directly to the MDG, it has only been since January 2003 that Kenya has officially had ‘free primary education’ widely understood to be a tool to ensure that for the poorest families, finances are no longer a barrier to school entry for children. However, whilst the number of children on the street has significantly reduced because of this policy, it does not however tell the whole story. Entry into schools for children is not completely free. Parents and guardians are still required to buy at least one school uniform for the child, as well as a desk and a chair, and also books, shoes and numerous other things that a child needs to study. The financial implications of this still see many families unable, or unwilling, to pay for their children to enter school, resulting in the child going to the streets either during the day to supplement the family income, or ‘full-time’, choosing a life on the street instead of one at home where food is sometimes harder to come by than some form of abuse.

AfCiC works with many families in the local area, both those of the children we work with directly, but also families with whom our paths have crossed at some point, and whose children we would consider ‘vulnerable’, potential future street children. We run both a child and family sponsorship programme, designed to link donors and supporters directly with families in the most need. Children who benefit from the child Sponsorship programme often require boarding school education due to un-feasible home-life conditions, and families benefiting from our family sponsorship programme are often assisted with the tools to create their own Income Generating Activities (IGA’s) so that they can begin to provide for their children in the long term rather than consistently looking for short survival.

The MDG’s, however, are not our only global focus. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) forms much of the basis for our work with schools, advocacy clubs and our own legal aid programme (KCLAW), where we endeavour to empower children to claim the rights duly owed them. Again, like the MDG’s, having a written policy and a plan to achieve it does not necessarily mean that those hoping to benefit do so. The UNCRC provides a long list of rights that children are owed, but children themselves are often oblivious to these, believing that abuse and neglect are either their own fault, or if nothing else, just a normal part of growing up. In our child rights clubs which operate in nearly 10 schools in the local area, children are educated about the rights they as children have, and are encouraged to share experiences, debate solutions, and talk about issues that are very much taboo in their homes and in local culture.

Working in line with global initiatives like this both gives hope for the future, but also highlights the need to effectively translate global goals into a local context, as the issues surrounding universal primary education emphasised. Another example we see here in Thika, and more widely in Kenya, is the issue of children’s food at schools. In many countries, particularly in the west, schools provide school lunches for their children. However, in many places in Kenya, it is the role of NGO’s like AfCiC to pay for or facilitate school feeding programmes that ensure hunger is not a reason to skip school and go to the street. The objective of MDG 1 (c) is that between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people suffering from hunger should be halved, and whilst in the short term, AfCiC is able to provide a hot meal each day for hundreds of children in Thika, the situation is not sustainable and nor should it be. The sad reality of life for many children in Thika is that they get more freedom, more security and often more food whilst living on the streets than they do at home and in school, meaning that the horror of street life is not always the worst case scenario.

Local factors hugely affect how we deal with children and other stakeholders in Thika, but we are of the belief and vision that those local factors are broadly similar in other towns in Kenya, and potentially even across other African countries. In the long term, by documenting our work and slowly building up a system of best practice, we hope that not only will we be able to have a positive impact on the lives of the children, families and communities who we work with in Thika, but also creating ways in which our work can be transferred to other organisations. Likewise, we work with many other organisations in Kenya and beyond from whom we learn and transfer knowledge.

Life for all of us is full of balances. We have to be able to respond to the local situation as we have a responsibility here to meet the needs of children. However, we also have to be aware of other organisations and how they work well and not so well, and importantly, how the work we are doing is linked to global objectives to fight many of the issues that cause children to come to the street in the first place, including hunger, poverty, education provision and HIV/AIDS.

]]> http://actionchildren.or.ke/955-global-vision/feed/ 0 http://actionchildren.or.ke/951-new-beginnings/ http://actionchildren.or.ke/951-new-beginnings/#comments Sun, 03 Mar 2013 16:30:22 +0000 afcic http://actionchildren.or.ke/?p=951 New Beginnings

In 2012, Children Lead the Way (CLTW) conducted several interventions with an aim of addressing working children issues in Thika and the neighboring districts. Among the interventions were a series of teacher training, community sensitization forums, as well as the establishment of District Child Labour Committee. http://actionchildren.or.ke/a-new-beginning-for-working-children-in-thika/ The interventions facilitated new beginnings for children and youth engaged in hazardous working environments through support to access formal education, vocational skills training and empowerment to improve their wellbeing.

Just a week ago, following a referral made by a teacher in Ruiru who was a beneficiary of school teacher training in Ruiru, Martin Kuria Kamau got his chance to meet with CLTW team. Since 2007, Kuria has worked as a night guard but in 2011, he was able to join a secondary school at Kagema secondary school in Kibichoi within Ruiru whilst working as a night guard. It is at this point that he met the teacher referred to above, by virtue of the fact that he guarded the residence within which the teacher resided. The teacher was concerned that Kuria was forced to work in such conditions and attend school at the same time.

Kuria left his home in Gatanga in 2007 having sat for his KCPE examination (end of Kenyan Primary School) the same year. The reason for his leaving the home was that he fell out with his step-father who had married Kuria’s mother after Kuria’s biological father had died. He reported that he had relational issues with his step-father who had problems accepting him and hence forced him to run away from home.

During the encounter with CLTW team, Kuria expressed his desire to continue attending school. The team explored possibilities of withdrawing him from the job and enabling him to access education in a boarding school. These sentiments were shared with the Thika East Quality Assurance Education Officer who recommended St Augustine Secondary School in Gatanga, Kuria’s rural home.

The CLTW Project Manager visited the school together with Kuria, and they were given a warm reception by the Head teacher. He was very keen to listen to Kuria’s case and raised several questions in line with the expected behavior in school bearing in mind the young man had been earning and had his freedom. During the discussion, the Head teacher was convinced that Kuria was committed to pursue education to the best of his ability. It was also agreed that his parents were to be traced, and if possible the same day, so that holistic support could be given to Kuria.

Immediately after the school visit, Kuria and the CLTW staff proceeded to his home and fortunately found both parents. As the mother was busy preparing a cup of tea, the manager had a chance of talking to the father who shared information on their income as peasant farmers. The family has an acre of land where they have 200 coffee plants. Coffee in the area had been neglected since 1970s after significant falls in prices, and the family also owned a cow calf as well as some maize, though the latter was not growing well.

During a discussion on way forward with both parents, the parents agreed to support Kuria but declared that they may not be in a position to provide financial support. The parents agreed to go to school for the meeting with the head teacher as requested. By this time it was past office hours but the Head teacher was still waiting. The meeting was brief as the head teacher realized he knew Kuria’s step father, and it was agreed that the parents will provide support by attending parent meetings, and contributing to development and welfare funds that may be required that is below 2000 Kenya shillings. The manager was requested to ensure Kuria reports within the next two days.

Most of the boys and girls we work with are much younger than Kuria, but through the CLTW scheme and its community focused work, Kuria finally got his new own fresh start in life, and reported to his new school in form three. In our conversations with Kuria, he noted his step father’s drinking, and described how he often came home late at night and would step on the food in the cooking pot, demanding that more be cooked, as well as him beating his mother in the presence of the children. The problems in his family are like many others that we work with, and they prevent children and young people like Kuria from claiming their rights and opportunities in life that many of us take for granted. Sometimes, it takes intervention from outside to facilitate these opportunities, and we will be working with Kuria and his family as he progresses through school.

When most people think about conflict, the image that comes to mind is guns and bullets, crying children hiding under their mothers’ skirts, and people carrying their belongings, walking to destinations unknown.

The truth is, violence, of any form, whether domestic, regional, national or international, has the power to affect children more than other populations in society. Children are, by nature of their age, helpless in many situations and violence leaves them more vulnerable than any other situation. Conflict is a violator of children rights around the world.

Kenya had enjoyed relative peace through the years leading up to the 2007 elections, but the results of those elections led to significant violence and thousands of people being displaced from their homes and others losing their lives. The violence took place for about two months after the elections results were announced and at the end of it all about 1,133 Kenyans were killed and 600,000 more displaced from their homes. Many children were orphaned and many of them were separated from their parents, never to see them again. Others lost their homes and had to move into camps for safety, living in a small tent with all of their families in one of the near 150 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. Most of the orphaned children ended up on the streets, surviving by begging for money and food, and collecting plastics, scrap metal and other sellable goods to pay for their base needs.

We would all like to protect our children from violent situations but the reality is that children see and hear more than they let on. In the month of January 2013, AfCiC, through the civic education team, sought to hear the views of the children on violence and on what they considered as conflict resolution. Forums with children, in 2 Primary Schools and in 2 High Schools, were held. The forums were in the form of cultural events and the children prepared songs, dances and poems.

Children from the different schools were tasked to come up with poems, choral verses, songs and plays on conflict and peace.  They wrote poems of suffering, of tears and of loss. They hoped and they begged for peace and understanding in their homes, their schools and in their country. They blamed adults, who they felt were responsible for their welfare, but who keep making bad decisions that affect them negatively. One poem stood out; it was entitled ‘2013’; and the poem had been composed by a young boy in Gaichanjiru Boys High School. The poem was a cry for better decisions by the end of the year 2013. It was a cry for help and a cry for understanding by all tribes and all the politicians. The poem highlighted the progress made over the years and painted a picture of how well life was going for the new year and just how easy it would be to destroy all the efforts made. One of the things that most stood out in the poem  was the plea for the protection of children.It sought to only have smiles and happy faces in the children that lived in it and for them to have a home.

The cry for peace by the children was repeated in all the poems and songs presented in the different events held. The bottom line is children are seeking to be involved in all the decisions that involve them. Tribal differences have all but disappeared in their generation as most of them cannot even talk in their mother tongue. To them this is not even an issue and this is a positive change as their generation will not be plagued by petty differences based on tribes. We owe them a chance to grow up and make this nation a better nation. They will bring a new beginning to our nation and to the people in it.

We continued this cry for peace in the upcoming elections, just this previous weekend, with a day in Mathari slums on the outskirts of Nairobi, home to 300,000 people, where we have partnered with ‘Kicks for Peace’, a vehicle advocating for fair and peaceful elections come March. We worked with street children and the community, organising a football tournament and other small activities as well as spending time at an outreach centre and clearing rubbish in the slum area.

Peace starts from all of us. Don’t hit your wife: talk to her, communicate with her, and there will be peace in your home for the night. Don’t assault your child and there will be peace and understanding in that home. It’s the little things that will make us a peaceful nation. Our children see and hear the conflict we perpetrate however little we might think it is. Its starts with us and what we do now will determine what future generations will do. If we destroy our country come March, we will only have ourselves to blame.

Offering a reward to both an NGO in the US and one outside the US, Fetzer are seeking “to understand the motivations and preconditions of exmplary cases of love and forgiveness at work in the world”.

At AfCiC, we see street children as one of the most overtly unloved portions of society, and we see it as our role and our pleasure to work alongside boys, girls, families and their communities to show them the love that is often missing from their lives.

You can see our entry in the competition here, as well as the video on youtube here.

We believe that the child comes first in what we do, and that proposition has to come from a basis of love. We’d love you to share his with your friends, in your workplace, in your church and on social media. Whilst we would greatly like to win the competition, it is equally if not more important, that the stories of the boys we work with are heard, and that people begin to understand the types of life they live, where they come from, and what we and you can do to help.

Thank you!

According to new estimates (International Labour Organisation), there are some 250 million children, aged between 5 and 14 years old, who are toiling in economic activity in developing countries. For close to one-half of them (or 120 million), this work is carried out on a full time basis, while for the remaining 50%, it is combined with schooling or other non-economic activities. Among school going children, up to one-third of the boys (33%) and more than two-fifths (42%) of the girls are also engaged in economic activities on a part-time basis. These 250 million children represent approximatel 15-20% of the total child population in the same age cohort.

Is is worth noting, however, that the overall estimates of 250 million working children are exclusive of children who are engaged in regular non-economic activities, including those who provide services of domestic nature on a full-time basis in their own parents’ or guardians’ households.

In Thika, a small industrial town forty kilometers north of Nairobi, the capital City of Kenya, the situation is not any different. The findings of a baseline study carried out by Action for Children in Conflict (AfCiC) with support from Save the Children in Kenya show that 96.9% of all children who were interviewed engage in domestic work irrespective of whether they are school going or out of school commercial working children. It further shows that 41.7% of children are currently engaged in some kind of paid work, 25.6% of them being boys.

To deal with this situation, AfCIC has partnered with government through the Ministry of Labor, as well as with Kenya Alliance for the Advancement of Children’s Rights (KAACR) to establish the District Child Labor Committee (DCLC) in Thika District. The role of the committee is to spearhead the process of making Thika a Child Labor free zone through various interventions and partnerships with stakeholders and NGO’s to ensure that Children are protected from exploitation.

Thika is one of the few districts in Kenya that have been selected to pilot the child labor free zones, and we hope that by leading this change, similar processes can be replicated across Kenya in a hope that other counties and districts will become Child Labour free. The year 2013 marks a new beginning for  children in this region who are engaged in any form of work, because through the DCLC, we are on the right track towards achieving a child labor free zone in Thika District and eventually Kiambu County.