Who We Work With
Street Children
UNICEF has defined three types of street children: Street-Living, Street-Working, Street-Family.
Street Living Children are children who ran away from their families and live alone on the streets.
Street Working Children are children who spend most of their time on the streets, fending for themselves, but returning home on a regular basis, maybe to sleep at night.
Children from Street Families: children who live on the streets with their families.
We work with both all three types.
Street life
On the streets children rapidly adapt their behaviour and resort to basic survival skills. They become hardened by their difficult lives and, with nobody to care for them, they form small gangs and learn to fight for their right to survive. They often become involved in substance abuse as a means of escaping the cold and hunger that pervade their daily lives. Their life experiences make it hard for them to trust other people, and they miss out on educational opportunities and adopt fatalistic attitudes rather than taking responsibility for their lives.
Street Kids now in ASK shelters
As well as street children, we work with many other children and young people who are living in extremely difficult circumstances. They are marginalised children, orphans, children living in abject poverty, children from broken homes, children who have suffered mental, physical and sexual abuse, exploitation, neglect, abandonment and human rights abuses.
South African Homesteads
Often these children are being neglected or forced by their parents (the very people who should be protecting and caring for them), to go out into the streets to beg for money to bring home. Other children are driven to the streets through hunger: they go out in search of food or carry out work in return for a few coins with which they can buy bread. This work is often of a hazardous and exploitative nature…rifling through rubbish dumps to find scrap metal to sell in Kenya, running errands for local milita in Iraq, or engaging in child prostitution in Thailand.
