Wednesday 4 November 2020

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.

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