Plight of street children during COVID-19

 

By ANNIE ZULU

LIVING as a street child is  already a situation of misery and the outbreak of COVID-19 has brought even greater distress to these vulnerable group of children.

On a good day, street children in Zambia survive by begging  and doing manual jobs such as carrying people’s luggage and cleaning car windows.

These children have not been spared from the devastating  impact of the COVID-19 from the time the country recorded its first case of the pandemic  in March 2020.

According to SOS Children’s Village statistics, Zambia has over 13,000 street children.

Some children living on the streets of Lusaka

The economic activities of street children have severely been affected due to some policies put in place to contain the disease and one can only imagine, but never understand the agony that these children have to endure as a result of  the pandemic.

Wearing a torn yellow t-shirt and blue dirty jeans, with a bottle of brown liquid in his hand, 15-year-old Jackson  narrated to me the plight of children on the street during the outbreak of COVID-19.

“Life has always not been easy on the streets of Lusaka, but this time around, things are much worse. People rarely give us food and we don’t get jobs as we used to because people don’t want to come to contact with us. Mostly they scream at us not to come close, when we approach them to assist with their bags in exchange for money,” he said.

Jackson’s narration is an indicator that precautionary measures taken by people to keep safe from COVID-19 have worsen the poverty of street children.

 As if that is not enough, the pandemic has also exposed these children to unhealthy environmental conditions that threaten their health.

 Some of them pick used facemasks in trying to protect themselves, while many of them are without masks, yet they meet and interact with different people, including other street children, who are just as vulnerable as they are.

As a matter of fact, they share the same space to sleep at night without  maintaining  any social distancing. This not only threaten their own health, but also put that of other people in society at risk.

Another street child Chanda (male,16) told me: “We just hear people talking about the corona disease, but nobody explains to us what it is. We see them wearing masks too and some shops don’t attend to us when we are not wearing one, so we just pick used ones and wear them in order to have access to some places.”

Chanda´s explanation tells a story of how some vulnerable groups have no clue about the coronavirus and how to prevent it, as they have no access to traditional and social media where information is mostly disseminated.

Lusaka Based Child Rights Activist Jacob Mwelwa is therefore calling for a quick response to the plight of street children with regards to COVID-19.

Mr Mwelwa said in an interview that street children were one of the few vulnerable groups that had been left out on the country's response plan to the pandemic.

According to him, there was need to provide them with welfare packages and protective materials and conduct COVID tests to ascertain their statuses.

“Street children have totally been left out on the response plan and they are on their own. Imagine if a person in employment can complain about the impact of COVID-19, how about the child on the street who has no one to take care of him? Let the Government, organisations that deals with children’s welfare and other stakeholders look into this issue.

“The other thing, these children do not put only their health at risk, but everyone else they come into contact with as well. Some of them might even have contracted the virus without knowing because the symptoms such as fever and tiredness is something they are used to living on the street and to them its normal,” Mr Mwelwa said.

Most of the children that roam the streets in Zambia are orphans but have families that have left them to fend for themselves, while others run away from their guardians due to maltreatment.  Another reason is poverty, as some of them work on the streets during the day and return home in the evening.

COVID-19 threatens people with disabilities

 

By ANNIE ZULU

INABILITY to access necessary medical services during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown has led to deaths of some people with disabilities in Zambia.

Some people living with disabilities who needed regular therapy for survival could not access medical services because of health restrictions put in place to contain the virus.

It became very difficult especially for this vulnerable group of people to access medical services and consequently some lost their lives in the process.

According to the United Nations (UN), persons with disabilities are among the hardest hit by COVID-19. Even under normal circumstances, the 1 billion persons with disabilities worldwide are less likely to access health care.

Belinda Kabaso of Lusaka´s Matero Township lost her mother who was not only visually impaired, but diabetic too in April 2020 because she could not access medical help on time.

She explains, “When mom complained of not feeling too well, we immediately took her to Matero Level One Hospital. But since she was also diabetic she was not properly checked as health personnel were more concerned with COVID-19 so they sent us back home.

“Two days later her condition worsened and she died while we were taking her to the hospital,” Belinda said.

Mwanida Banda, another Lusaka resident, told this reporter how her brother who was physically impaired and had contracted COVID-19 died in June as a result of the trauma of been in isolation centre with strangers.

Mwanida’s brother used to get nervous and develop convulsions around strangers so the family had asked the management at Levy Mwanawasa Hospital where he was isolated to allow a relative to stay besides him but the request was turned down considering the nature of the disease.

“My brother was conscious when they evacuated him from the house in an ambulance and taken to Levy Mwanawasa Hospital.  Later when he regained conscious, he found himself in a place with strangers, there was no support system that he is used to and he started convulsing.

“As a family, we became concerned because we knew that when my brother is exposed to strangers, he goes into convulsions. We informed the hospital about this and asked them to allow at least a close relative to be part of health personnel caring for him but they refused.

“They also refused to allow us to give him his highly specialised wheelchair, so this situation contributed to the death of my brother,” she claimed.

But besides the health implications, COVID-19 has also inflicted serious social and economic consequences, especially on vulnerable people.

Majority of people with disabilities are said to be poor and the outbreak of the pandemic has just worsened their situation.

The Zambia Agency for Persons with Disabilities (ZAPD) Director General Julien Mwape explained how COVID-19 was adversely affecting her members.

ZAPD Director General Julien Mwape 

“People with disabilities are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19. Many are poor and the lockdown few months ago saw livelihoods being disrupted as most of them are on the streets and not in formal employment.

“The lockdown entailed people staying home and this caused poverty levels to increase and some have not recovered up to now,” Ms Mwape said.

She called for a strategic intervention plan, stressing there was no disability protocol in the response towards COVID-19 at many levels.

“The general response mechanism that was put out did not really cater for persons with disability and did not take all the disability aspects into focus.

“People with disabilities are not consulted before COVID-19 messages are conceptualised, and the channels of dissemination are not accessible to them. Many don’t own radio or television sets some of them are visually impaired and can’t read or write,” she said.

However, Ms Mwape believes not all is not lost even in these challenging times, provided Government puts in more efforts to establish and strengthen interventions.

“Generally what can help is a proper social protection response strategy that should help us bring back people to livelihood.  Our Government should do what every country is doing out there, plan for shock responsive social protection.

“Putting in place a shock responsive social protection strategy, something that can help reduce shock but still enable those in authority to reach the vulnerable.

“Times like this require careful planning such as knowing proper statistics and data. So Government needs to plan in such a way that people are not left on their own health wise and in any other aspects of life,” she said.

The 2017 report by the Zambia Federation of Disability Organisation (ZAFOD) indicates that Zambia has about 2 million persons living with disabilities. Visual, hearing, physical, communication and intellectual impairments are the prevalent forms of disability in country.