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Monday, January 29, 2018

According to an article in The Citizen, the number of street children in Tanzania’s major cities of Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Mwanza and Mbeya has gone up as children from broken families find their way to the street due to a combination of factors, most notably poverty and a lack of education.

This sharp rise, the article states, has been linked to the outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, along with economic hardships and the challenges of urbanization that have damaged social relations and structures, leading to a rapid increase in the number of street children.

While HIV/AIDS was the main driving factor in the 1980s and 90s, prevalence has remained steady and new infections have dropped. However, the damage is already done for an estimated 1.3 million children aged 17 and below in Tanzania who have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS, many of whom reportedly end up having to live and work on the streets to make ends meet.

So the question is, has Tanzania’s urban street children population really gone up?

PesaCheck has investigated the claim published in a Citizen newspaper editorial and finds the claim that the number of street children in Tanzania is increasing to be INCONCLUSIVE for the following reasons:

While much work has been done by the government and civil society to raise public awareness on the issue of child homelessness and rehouse children living on Tanzanian streets, the problem remains endemic, with a survey carried out by Mkombozi, an NGO working to rehabilitate street children, indicating that 22 percent of children had migrated to the streets as a result of school exclusion and inability to pay school fees.

The most visible manifestation of this is the number of school-age children enrolled in child labour in the country, with 5 million Tanzanian children aged 5 to 17 engaged in work according to a 2014 survey by the International Labour Organization. Of these, 3.1 million were engaged in what would be considered ‘hazardous labour’ in contaminated environments where environmental degradation increases the risk of injury and disease.

However, conclusive data on the overall trend in Tanzania’s street child population is hard to come by, mainly due to the contradictory nature of the data and the limited scope of the studies into the phenomenon of child homelessness.

Furthermore each city has its own dynamics yielding different results. A 2011 census states that the number of street children in Arusha was decreasing, with the number identified standing at 520. However, at the same time the number of street children in the neighbouring city of Moshi was seen to increase, on the rise at the time.

The census report also states that the numbers have been decreasing 5 years prior to the 2011 census, but another article, this time by the Tanzania Daily News, points to an increase in the number of street children in 2012 following a survey conducted in some 95 districts in the country.

Mkombozi’s census figures note that there has been an overall decrease in the number of children and young people coming to the streets from the communities they were working with.

The 2012 survey cited by the Tanzania Daily News puts the number of street and vulnerable children in the country at 849,054, but more recent figures by the Global Giving Foundation estimates that there are 437,500 street children in Tanzania.

The lack of data has made it difficult to estimate the overall trend in the population of street children at the national level, but a 2012 UNICEF report citing information sourced from groups working with homeless and vulnerable children states that overall numbers have been rising.

A 2016 article published in the Tanzania Daily News states that the number of street children aged 14 and below in Tanzania has decreased by 40 per cent for the past three years owing to various joint initiatives by the government and private sector. However, this report only cites data from a study conducted in Mwanza, where another article from the same year reported a “sharp increase” in the street child population.

A 2017 article looking at street children in the Kilimanjaro Region and the city of Arusha notes that the street children population is on the decline due to “heightened awareness on the rights of young community members”, but fails to cite any data to support this claim.

Therefore the claim that the number of street children in urban Tanzania is on the rise is INCONCLUSIVE due to the lack of substantial evidence for or against it. Figures collected by different studies covering the same cities have yielded vastly different figures. Furthermore the dynamics of each city mean that fluctuation are not uniform across the board, meaning a more comprehensive study is needed before a trend can be established.

|title= Tanzanian Street Children |author= by Consortium for Street Children |pub= Global Giving