Street Children: The Forgotten Generation [FAILED competition entry]

Nelson Mandela once said that “education is the most powerful weapon with which you can use to change the world”. In the U.K. teaching is the beating heart of society where acceptable cultural attitudes are learnt by children who are pumped through primary to secondary school and many on to university.

In the classroom, the pressure of parents for their sons and daughters to do well is high and national benefactors like the government are equally keen to see struggling institutions do well. The pampering of many state schools with equipment ranging from chemistry textbooks to electronic whiteboards is seen as the ideal solution.

With such luxuries and indulgences, the education system in the U.K. should be in a rosy state of affairs. However the smell of new science textbooks and the gloss of electronic whiteboards have now been smeared by rapidly accumulating “sticky” affairs in the media.

Teacher unions are clashing on the validity of SATs whilst universities, like Oxford, are skeptical about the implementation of the “super” A* grade in A-Levels in 2010. It suggests there is much confusion surrounding what children should be learning on their way to that coveted university place or wanted apprenticeship.

So when a continent doesn’t have the ability to pluck prospective teachers from a conveyor belt of graduates fresh out of their degrees, or a contingency plan to fall back on, many of Africa’s children have been shunned into the wilderness of the streets, deprived of shelter, education and a way of life.

Cramped, disgusting, unsafe, homeless, diseased, there are many adjectives to describe conditions that UNICEF estimates around 10 million street children live with each day in Africa. One of these is Josephine Agbi Accra who lives in KonKomba (a shanty town), Ghana, a place notorious for prostitution and violence. An orphan, Josephine was found by a fieldworker of Street Child Africa, pregnant to a child whose father had left her to fend for herself. Josephine’s situation is all too common amongst street children in Africa where education is still widely viewed as a privilege not a right.

In the North West Province of South Africa, children are “privileged” to walk 4 hours a day from high in the Magaliesberg Mountains down to the major city of Rustenberg to get to school and back. The idea of bus transportation is alien to them and by dusk the dusty roads are commandeered by rapists looking to pick up innocent schoolgirls walking home. There is no free bus pass issued to anyone outside a 3 mile radius by the council as in my home county.

Instead local governments are often corrupt with greedy politicians looking to boost their own income at the expense of helping others. This leaves many schools in a sorry state of affairs, with many overcrowded, built from poor quality materials and lacking the basic sanitary requirements. Although it would be a mistake to overlook the impact of NGOs (non-governmental organizations), it is hard to assist an entire continent when there are an estimated 21 million children of primary school age living in sub Saharan Africa alone.

Many of the street children not being found by charities like Street Child Africa are inadvertently becoming part of a forgotten generation in a continent where neglect is all too familiar. Mariama from Maputo, Mozambique is 8 years old and already the sole guardian of her 3 younger siblings – one of which is still a baby. The person, who found her on the street, acknowledges that without foreign aid, these children will forever remain invisible to the rest of the world.

There is a desperate need for the emergence of a new-age Africa to rise from the shadows to promote education as an entity everyone is entitled to; regardless of color, race or gender. Charities like UNICEF are making inroads by promoting non-formal education in villages like Konovohogho, Côte d’Ivoire.

This method of teaching enables children to sandwich school between raising crops and looking after livestock in the morning and evening. All materials and teacher training are provided for by UNICEF in the hope many of the children continue onto higher education once their basic literacy skills have been acquired.

This is why ActionAid UK dubs them as the “feeder schools of Africa” that have the biggest impact in countries with the worst literacy rates. The major benefit of non-formal education is that children can adjust their timetables depending on how productive the agricultural season is. In the drier months children can devote more time to schooling whilst during the wetter periods more time can be spent on the farmland.

However one criticism of non-formal education is that it is over reliant on its sole major sponsor: worldwide charity. There is much debate as to whether the global recession is enough to hinder a person’s good nature to donate money to charity. Africa’s problem is that it is dependent on foreign aid much like a young child is attached to its mother. However where it takes years for an infant to learn responsibility, for Africa it is taking decades.

According to the Right To Education Project website, street children are highly concentrated in countries with struggling economies. In the past this would have described countries in the third world but now, in a recession hit era, it can account for others such as the U.K. Don’t let the new textbooks and electronic whiteboards deceive you, the U.K. is heading towards darker days for education. If various affairs aren’t sorted out soon then street children shall perhaps become a more familiar term closer to home.