About Street Child Africa
Street Child Africa aims to give every street child the chance to turn their own life around and enjoy a better future free from poverty, disease and abuse. It aims to give street children hope.
Street Child Africa is an umbrella charity, which raises funds in the UK and makes grants to African NGOs working directly with street children in Ghana, Mozambique, Senegal, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The charity currently has seven partner agencies who are exclusively devoted to helping street children. It is the only UK registered charity working solely and specifically to assist African street children throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
Street Child Africa helps African street children in the following ways:
Baby care: providing crèches for young street mothers, so that they have somewhere safe to leave their babies so that they can find casual work and earn enough money to eat. They can also leave their babies in the crèches if they wish to begin educational sponsorship or vocational training with the support of Street Child Africa.
Ante and post natal care: for the many street girls who end up pregnant, frightened, and vulnerable at a very young age.
Refuges: providing basic literacy and maths classes, demonstrations in various skills and crafts, recreational facilities, counselling, medical care, and a safe place for street children to play and rest.
Sponsorship: sponsorship lasts 3 years, and a street child is provided with everything they need including placement with a family, counselling support, food, clothes, tools, and travel expenses. They may choose to learn a trade, or to go to school and gain a qualification. On completion of their training, they are assisted in finding employment and somewhere to live.
Street work: trained social workers seek out and meet the children on the streets, befriending them, counselling them, and encouraging the to visit a refuge for assistance. The innovative Street Workers Training Programme provides funding for street workers to find new young African social workers, and teach them how to relate to children who live on the streets, and how to deal with the difficult and often dangerous aspects of this demanding but essential job.
Our history
Street Child Africa was founded in 1998 to support the work of Patrick Shanahan (now the Executive Director of the charity).
Having spent 34 years of his life living and working in Accra, Ghana, Patrick was horrified to witness the increasing number of very small children who were beginning to live, work and sleep on the streets in appalling conditions of poverty and exclusion.
He co-founded two agencies in Accra to help these children – CAS in 1993, and Street Girls Aid in 1996.
The aim of CAS was to recognise that more and more young children were appearing on the streets of Accra, to offer those children love and compassion, to find out what had caused their situation, and to try and offer assistance to them which was relevant to their unique situation and which genuinely helped these children to help themselves.
CAS quickly found out that street children were the result of the breakdown of rural economies and the family unit, due to horrendous poverty throughout Africa.
Children were being driven to the big cities in search of work, only to find themselves homeless and unable to make the money they needed to survive.
Sadly, although their existence in the cities was grim, it still offered these children their best chance of survival – and so numbers of children flocking to the big cities in desperation continued to grow. Once living on the streets, children soon became vulnerable to intense poverty, disease, hunger, abuse, and all kinds of dangers.
So, in order to help, refuges were set up to offer street children a safe place to go where they could rest, learn, receive medical attention, try out a new skill, play, talk things through with a counsellor, and if they chose to do so, undertake sponsorship to learn a skill or gain a qualification.
It soon became apparent that young street girls were especially vulnerable, and that this was resulting in large numbers of babies being born on the streets.
Street girls found themselves giving birth in dangerous and frightening circumstances, and were unable to care for their babies properly. Street Girls Aid was set up specifically to assist these girls - providing all kinds of assistance including ante and post-natal care.
The baby care system provides free crèche facilities for street girls so their babies can be safely looked after whilst the mothers seek casual work to survive, or undertake vocational sponsorship in order to gain a qualification and proper employment.
Street Child Africa was set up by Patrick Shanahan in 1998 to assist these two agencies in raising funds and awareness in the UK on behalf of African street children. Today, it has seven partner agencies working in Ghana, Zambia, Mozambique, Senegal and Zimbabwe.
There are hundreds of thousands of children living, working and sleeping on the streets of every African country. AIDS, massive poverty, and the breakdown of the family are causing the numbers to increase alarmingly all the time.
New generations of babies are being born on the streets to parents who themselves are street children – these babies will never know any other way of life without outside help. Despite this, Street Child Africa remains the only charity in the UK solely dedicated to helping Africa’s street children.
Its responsibility is to raise funds and awareness in the developed world on behalf of Africa’s street children. All of the charitable funds that we raise are distributed to Africa street children agencies to strengthen their work.
As well as this, the charity lobby on behalf of Africa’s street children to make people aware of this disgraceful situation, and to tell them what they can do to make things better for a street child in Africa.
Since 1998, Street Child Africa have helped at least 400 children undergo vocational sponsorship and leave the streets – some ex street children have even returned to the agencies which helped them in the first place in order to work there, and help future generations of street children who are in the same desperate situation which they themselves were once in.