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Steets
Ahead: Annual report January - December 2004
Streets Ahead
February 17, 2005
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Introduction
More children live on the streets in the Central Business District of
Harare and are there because of the effects of unemployment, HIV and AIDS,
family poverty created by the prevailing economic conditions, persistent
droughts, family breakdowns and more often due to neglect and physical
or sexual abuse in their respective homes or communities. According to
a recent UNICEF study, 35% of the children left home as a result of poverty,
and another 20% left home as a result of physical and sexual abuse within
their communities. Most of the children on the streets in Harare come
from Epworth with 63%, a densely resettlement zone situated a few kilometers
east of Harare urban center.1
Traces of poverty
are also evident in some of the high-density areas where the majority
of the urban children come from. According to the Zimbabwe Human Development
Report 2003, in 1995, 57% of the Zimbabwean Population lived in extreme
poverty. The figure increased to 69% at the end of 2002. Recent trends
indicate that poverty is on the increase in both rural and urban areas.
A number of factors
have been attributed to the increase in poverty such as rapid economic
decline, rapid decline in agricultural production, low disposable incomes,
high structural unemployment and high prevalence of HIV and AIDS.
Zimbabwe, with one
of the highest sero-prevalence rates in the world, has been particularly
hard hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Estimates indicate that between 20%
and 28% of adults in Zimbabwe (ages of 15 and 49) are currently infected
with HIV (Government statistics and UNAIDS/CDC 2003). Approximately 4
million people in Zimbabwe are living with HIV and AIDS with an estimated
3000 AIDS related deaths every week.
According to UNICEF, the number of orphans in sub-Saharan
Africa will continue to rise significantly over the next seven to ten
years. Zimbabwe has an estimated number of 960,000 orphans aged 1 - 142
. The majority of the children working with Streets Ahead claim to have
lost one or both parents, and, with HIV being most prevalent at the productive
age group we assume that some of their parents succumbed to the epidemic.
Therefore, some of these children live on the streets as a consequence
of the epidemic.
1. UNICEF and Harare
Task Force on Children Living on the Streets. December 2003 - January
2004
2. Children on the Brink 2002
Visit the Streets
Ahead fact sheet
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