Annual Report 2006-2007
Annual Report 2006-2007
ASK in Bolivia
ASK recently decided to provide funding to the Bolivian Street Child Project, which assists children living permanently in the streets of La Paz. Most of these children have run away from home due to physical or sexual abuse, and approximately 20% have been totally abandoned by their families: the only family they know are their fellow street children. Shockingly, the majority of street children in La Paz are between the ages of six and fifteen.
These children face multiple risks that threaten their development and their lives in general. Lack of adequate shelter, nutrition, education, healthcare, and loving caretakers puts them at great risk for any number of medical problems, mental illnesses, and social difficulties. The prevalence of drug abuse and unsafe sexual practices among the street children only compounds these risks. Often, street children are victimized by other street children, but police and other adults are also common perpetrators of physical and sexual violence.
Outreach workers identify and build up a relationship of trust with street children in the hope that they will leave the hazardous environment of the streets and enter one of the residential programmes.
Children coming off the streets are initially encouraged to attend a transition home where they receive intensive services in a highly supportive has become comfortable with the stability offered in the transition home he can be placed in a permanent home run by the project.
ASK in Egypt
The Better Life Association, founded in 1985, runs a project located in the slums of El Salam City, just outside of Cairo. Against a backdrop of overcrowding, malnutrition, disease and unemployment, the Better Life Association provides a refuge and the possibility of an education to some of the city’s thousands of street children. Many of these children have been forced into life on the streets through extreme poverty, and engage in hazardous activities in order to feed themselves. UNICEF estimates that up to 15% of Egyptian children aged 6-14 are currently working in such activities.
The Better Life Association runs a Day Shelter where street children receive food, medical care, and schooling. The main aim of the project is to provide education to children who have either stopped going to school because parents are unable to afford fees or uniforms, or who have never had the opportunity to attend school. Better Life works in close collaboration with the children’s families and will support them where possible, paying school fees when parents are unable to meet these needs. The association also carries out activities which benefit the wider community: families are assisted with the provision of food, blankets, clothing and medical care.
The Association plans to construct a new centre outside of El Salam, offering permanent residential care for up to 200 children. The centre will also enable the Association to respond to the specific needs of adolescent boys, who are particularly exposed to peer pressure from older boys and male relatives, and are often drawn into a life of drug-taking and unemployment. The Association plans to run a programme of vocational training that would teach the boys skills such as brick-laying, plumbing, metal work, mechanics and electronics, thus offering them the chance to break the cycle of poverty that becomes the norm.
ASK has funded the Better Life Association for six years, contributing towards clothing for children, educational costs, medicines, school uniforms and computer equipment.
ASK in India
The Republic of India is the second most populous country in the world. Although acceleration in economic growth has made India among the 10 fastest growing developing countries, the country’s per capita income remains low and 26 per cent of the population live below the income poverty line.
India has the largest number of child labourers in the world. There is widespread poverty, unemployment, increasing rural-urban migration, attraction of city life and a lack of political will to address the increasing numbers of children on the streets. Street children are subject to malnutrition, hunger, health problems, substance abuse, theft, as well as physical and sexual abuse.
ASK is active in Bangalore, India’s largest city, where it supports the Drishya Project. Drishya helps the very poorest children of the city, drawn from the slums and urban squat settlements. These children are at risk from the threat of violence, drugs, and enforced child prostitution. The Drishya Project has developed the concept of ‘barefoot teaching’ whereby individuals from local communities are recruited to teach basic literacy and numeracy to children in informal schools owned by the community. As well as the fulfilment of helping vulnerable children, teachers learn important skills and are rewarded with a modest salary, thus ensuring that all benefits derived from the project remain within the local community.
ASK also funds Care and Compassion, a foundation based in Panaji, Goa. Although Goa is a popular tourist destination, extreme poverty exists in the area with high numbers of children living and working on the streets. Care and Compassion runs an orphanage for 18 children. Whilst the majority of children are orphans, some are from single parents or have been abandoned by their parents who are simply too poor to look after their children.
ASK in Iraq
Iraq is in a state of civil war with tens of thousands of killings every year. Huge numbers of children are now orphaned, destitute and traumatized by the conflict. An Iraqi engineer, who returned to Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein and saw the poor state his country was in, decided to raise the necessary funds to convert his house into an emergency shelter for these children. The Baghdad Shelter now provides a safe haven for 20 children.
Whilst the children in Iraq are amongst the most vulnerable in the world, funding for the Shelter has not been forthcoming as many donors are reluctant to channel money into a war zone. ASK have provided vital funds for the initial set up and ongoing funds to enable the Shelter to continue operating.
ASK in Kenya
Action for Children in Conflict began a programme in 2004 to address the problem of the ever-increasing number of street children in Thika, Kenya. The programme addresses the needs of these children through a holistic approach aimed at their rehabilitation and long-term social reintegration. Street children are identified through outreach work and encouraged to attend a Day Care Centre and residential care centre. Various prevention activities are undertaken aimed at keeping children in school and stemming the flow of children who take to the streets (feeding programmes, school holiday clubs, legal aid and advocacy work), and impoverished families are provided with small loans that enable them to engage in income generating activities.
ASK co-funds the Street Children Day Care Centre in Thika, which offers children a safe and caring environment away from the streets. Children have access to food, advice and literacy classes and are encouraged to leave the streets and return home to their families and schools.
ASK in South Africa
ASK has supported The Homestead project in Cape Town, South Africa, since 2001. Established in 1982, the Homestead’s mission is “to help street children reconstruct their shattered lives”, and it has developed a model for working with street children which is admired not only in Africa, but throughout the world.
The Homestead sends outreach workers out into the streets, where they befriend children who are homeless or in danger of drifting to the streets. The first step for the children is a Drop-In Centre, which is open every weekday morning and provides meals, showers and clean clothes to the children. Children are encouraged to make positive choices about their lives, and being to develop their self-esteem.
The focus of the Homestead’s work is to provide durable solutions to street children and to encourage them, where possible, to return to their families and communities of origin. Sometimes, however, this is not possible due to family breakdown or because families are simply too poor to feed and clothe their children. Where this is the case, the Homestead places these children either in temporary accommodation or in a children’s home.
The Homestead seeks to address the underlying poverty which invariably causes children to drift to the streets. To this end, it established a Job Creation Project in 2000 aimed at helping the female relatives of street children to produce sustainable incomes. The women learn skills such as beadwork and hand-sewing, and have established contracts with businesses both in South Africa and Overseas, enabling them to sell bags, jewellery and other crafts at a reasonable profit.
ASK in Thailand
In Pattaya, Thailand, many children are drawn into prostitution as the only means of earning a living. This affects both girls and boys and children as young as 12 are known to be involved in the sex tourism industry, which exists largely to satisfy the desires of White Western males.
With support from ASK, a Day Centre has been established so that these children have a safe place to go during the day, where they can enjoy food, a shower, medical care and basic literacy classes. The aim is that, over a period of time, children will be persuaded to move away from the street environment and into the Centre for Street Children. The Centre, run under the auspices of the Pattaya Orphanage, currently has accommodation for 140 children. However, the new building is expected to host an additional 400 children.
Children involved in prostitution are at risk from HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Funding from ASK has enabled the creation of a health screening programme to help address this problem.
ASK in Uganda
The civil war in northern Uganda has left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Children have been forcibly abducted by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army – a notorious rebel group – and forced to fight as soldiers or used as sex slaves. Whilst stories of the atrocities are horrendous, and the humanitarian crisis is among the worst in the world, the situation in Uganda is largely ignored by the media. Thousands of people have been displaced by the conflict, and many children have been separated from their families. The rebels have decimated many communities, pillaging and raping along the way, a factor which has also precipitated the spread of HIV among local people.
ASK supports the work of the Charity for Peace Foundation, a Ugandan project staffed by local people. The project aims at the rehabilitation and reintegration of child soldiers into their home communities as well as providing support for orphans and other vulnerable children. The funding which ASK has provided has enabled the Charity for Peace Foundation to set up family tracing services, designed to reunite parents and children who have become separated during the conflict, and to build a much-needed counselling centre for children.
ASK in the UK
This prosperous country of our might seem like an unlikely choice for ASK’s funding, but in fact, an estimated 100,000 children run away from home every year – 25% of them under 11 years old. ASK supports two projects which help to provide a refuge for such people: The Nomad Project in Rotherham, Yorkshire, and the Charnwood Youth Action Project in Loughborough.
With both projects, ASK’s funding provides the opportunity for young people to participate in recreational activities whilst they go through the process of trying to rebuild their lives. Many of the children are from disadvantaged backgrounds or are educationally marginalised in some way. Others are the children of asylum seekers or immigrants, who have simply become separated from their parents.
