Hope for street families as state changes tact in dealing with menace

Nakuru || Wednesday, April 12, 2023

K.N.A By Anne Mwale

The State Department for Social Protection is shifting the focus of rehabilitation of street families from the children’s homes to family and community care.

According to Chairperson of Street Families Rehabilitation Trust Fund (SFRTF) Ms Mary Wambui rescue, reintegration and re-socialization of the street families into the community care will solve the problem which occurs when those placed in the homes achieve 18 years.

The Fund will also conduct a national census of street families in a bid to obtain an actual street population which will help in planning on how to zero rate street families.

The first national census of street families in the country was held in 2018 by the State Department for Social Protection in partnership with Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) and United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Ms Wambui explained that the countrywide exercise will be carried out in order to obtain segregated data to help in conducting rescue, rehabilitation and reintegration of street families.

Ms Wambui added that SFRTF through the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection was working with partner institutions including rehabilitation centres, religious institutions and children’s homes to holistically address the problem of street families.

Ms Wambui was speaking at a Nakuru hotel during a capacity building workshop organized by SFRTF for partner institutions involved in rescuing and rehabilitating street families. Also present was the fund’s acting Chief Executive Officer Ms Carolyne Towett.

The chairperson added, “The government alone cannot solve the issue, and individuals as well as the church, should come on board. Each family is unique and one approach cannot solve the issue. Some of them are addicts and others do not have homes or ran away from home or they were just kicked out’’.

She went on “Giving them a house is not enough, they also need psycho-social support, income generating activities and education so that they can stay off the streets,”

While calling for more budgetary allocations to SFRTF the Chairperson termed the issue of street families as “multi-faceted.”

“To succeed in addressing the increasing number of street families, we should first address the root causes. These include among others poverty, rural-urban migration, broken societal and domestic violence,” she said.

Ms Wambui added that people have become too individualistic, another issue that is driving some to the streets because they are not able to share the things afflicting them.

The counties with the highest concentrations of street persons are Nairobi with 15, 337, Mombasa 7529, Kisumu 2,746, Uasin Gishu 2,147 and Nakuru 2,005.

Most of the 46,639 street persons were males at 72.4 percent and females at 27.6 percent, the majority being the youth at 45.3 percent followed by children at 33.8 percent and the older persons at 2.4 percent according the 2018 National Census of Street Families Report.

The census also revealed that reasons for going to the streets were varied including: fear of being reprimanded, corporal punishment, lack of school fees, mistreatment by relatives and mental illness. Others include death of parents, domestic violence, peer influence and being born on the streets.

Majority of the children who lived on the streets with parents were below 10 years of age while 24 percent were orphans. 20 percent of the street persons did not know the whereabouts of their parents.

The Street Families Rehabilitation Trust Fund (SFRTF) was established in 2003 months after Mwai Kibaki took office as the third president of Kenya, but became operational in 2019.

The fund’s vision is to create a country “free of street families” and the mission is “to coordinate and develop capacity, mobilize resources to facilitate and monitor rehabilitative, re-integrative and preventive programmes for street families.”

Ms Towett stated that SFRTF through Public-Private partnerships was working to reintegrate the street persons back to the community by addressing discrimination and stigma, rejection and exclusion from the mainstream society.

“Even after rehabilitation, street children continue to feel excluded from society and mistreated, despite the fact that all they want is to fit in and live normal lives,” added the acting CEO.

Ms Towett disclosed that the census will capture data on various aspects of street families, including the socio-economic and political factors behind their circumstances.

“The information that we will gather will go a long way in helping us to come up with evidence-based decisions on how best to deal with the challenges that street families face,” Ms Towett said.

Some of the adversities street families face, are limited access to basic healthcare, physical violence and poor living conditions due to lack of proper shelter.

“In light of all these challenges, we look forward to the government and stakeholders utilizing the findings in the census to come up with strategies for helping the street families,” she added.

Ms Towett termed the upcoming census as a milestone that will help the fund to come up with a concrete plan for expanding the capacity of rehabilitation centres across the country. 

She also urged Kenyans to support people living in the streets saying, “The greatest poverty is not the lack of food, but rather the lack of love and support.”

Courtesy K.N.A