Street Children - Early Encounter

The Challenge: an estimated 100 million children live on the streets of our cities worldwide. Often addicted to a brutal street life of gang-crime and violence these children grow up populating our prisons and unable to really participate in the wider community.
An estimated 2200 street children projects exist worldwide yet most of them struggle to effectively rehabilitate and reintegrate these children; it's not just a matter of getting the child out of the street, but also to take the street culture out the child. The addiction to drugs and to an unrestrained and destructive lifestyle is a challenge even for the best.

The Big Idea: Research started in 2004 to identify alternatives discovered that children arrived to the city through certain urban nerve centres or 'gate-ways'; the bus station, the city market, the main taxi stand. Furthermore, in these gateways it was learned that children were encountered by other street children, drug sellers or brothel owners and through those sucked into the culture of the streets. It was surprising how quickly this encounter happened; within about 20 minutes a child was met and recruited into a known down-ward spiral. Sadly it was after this point that 99% of projects started working to connect, extract and rehabilitate the child. A new approach was needed:

The Big Solution: Why don't we encounter them first? A study was started to explore the viability of building an 'early encounter' system where a new child would be identified and encountered within 15 minutes of arrival onto the street. Once encountered the child would be placed in a community project, authorities and the child's family contacted and a group of professionals would assess the best way forward. 19 community based organizations in Cochabamba Bolivia formed a network of response and a team of 4 staff hired to man the encounter centre. The data on where children were arriving from provided the guidance on where to focus preventative work.

Result: In the first year 300 children were encountered and 1200 reached through preventative measures. A new city is now being added every 6 months aiming to encounter more than 27 000 children in the next 5 years.

 

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