A future brighter than an orange?

With a skip and a jump the little girl came panting up, pointed to her bare feet, and in voluble Punjabi and with expansive signs explained she had run down the litter strewn and muddy street to say hello, or rather ‘a salaam a leikum’. My relationship with the street children in our local bazaar in Islamabad had definitely progressed from the time I had bought a group some oranges, precipitating an unfortunate free-for-all by the side of a speeding highway.

Street children are not usually the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of Islamabad. Described as ‘twenty minutes outside Pakistan’, Islamabad is a city of big houses, dual carriage-ways and expensive shops. But Islamabad’s planners of the 1960s ignored the possibility of any urban poor, so squeezed in-between the central bazaars are the katchi-abadies, the slums. A five minute walk separates the expensive boutiques of ‘Supermarket’ from the narrow unpaved streets, open drains, cats cradle of electricity wires and litter strewn channels of 100 Quarters. Irreconcilably divided by money and power, yet the two worlds meet on the streets of the bazaars where children run around shouting and begging. The worlds also meet in the city schools. None of the katchi-abadies have their own schools; children attend general government schools. But in a country with among the worst educational records in Asia (female literacy stands at 36%), children from the katchi-abadies are at a high risk from the vicious cycle of dropping out of school, working on the streets, drug abuse and unemployment.

‘We didn’t get support from home so couldn’t keep up with the standard of the class’. A conversation with a group of older boys throws some light on the reasons for the high number of children dropping out of school here. And a comment which came up time and again in conversation with community members: ‘because we are not educated, our children are not educated’, and ‘we are uneducated so our children cannot survive in schools’. These community members have put their finger on the heart of the problem. If adults are aware of the importance of education they can prevent their children from begging, ensure they attend school, and support them in their school work. Dropping-out due the expense of uniforms or books, because children have no legal papers, because they need to look after younger siblings or their families need money all come down to the root issue that parents are unaware of the pivotal role that education plays in kicking a downward spiral of poverty.

This recognition from within these communities that they need to encourage their children’s education is a significant first step. The Mountain Institute for Educational Development (MIED), a local charity, runs Non-Formal Education (NFE) centres in the slums, helping children who have dropped out to regain a standard sufficient to re-enter formal schools. MIED’s NFE teachers, themselves from the communities, work tirelessly walking from door to door talking to parents, exploring with them their concerns about education and encouraging them to enrol their children in the centres. Just a few people from within a community can be a catalyst for change: last year more than 200 children graduated from the NFE centres into formal schools.

So, for children who live with their families but may work or beg on the streets, adult awareness-raising is crucial. But as in most developing countries, many boys leave their rural homes to earn money in the cities, and end up living 24/7 on the streets. There are no reliable statistics available for the number of children living on the streets in Pakistan, although some estimates put the number as high as 1.2 million. Nadeem works in a car workshop in a town in the North West Frontier Province. The death of his father left him the family’s main wage earner, forcing him to leave home and an education for work. He now earns a meagre 30Rs (30p) for each punishing 14 hour day. Rural government primary schools do little to attract boys like Nadeem to the opportunities of an education in their home villages. Rural schools are sinking under the combined challenges of teacher absenteeism, collapsing buildings, rote learning, corporal punishment and no resources.

But there are glimmers of hope. A community member in a village in Chakwal in the Punjab said proudly that all children from his village attend the local school: ‘education is good whether it is for males or females. The real thing is consciousness – it should be in everybody’. Such a view is the result of three years community mobilisation work by the field staff of MIED. And deep in the Karakoram mountains, five hours by treacherous road to the nearest city and subject to perishing cold winters, was a flourishing school. With a computer lab, museum, and science lab it could rival schools in the developed world. Run by the community rather than the government, families routinely spend a significant proportion of their annual income on education. What is the secret of their success? The Agha Khan Education Services has been promoting the cause of education in this village since 1946. Change hasn’t occurred overnight.

Except a few smiles and free oranges I could do little to help the little girl in the bazaar in Islamabad or Nadeem directly. There is no quick answer to the educational challenges for street children; any comprehensive solution cannot be divorced from the wider situation. Adult education and improving schools in rural areas will have an immeasurable impact addressing the root causes, albeit in the longer term. Change is possible: we need to take the current plight of street children as a kick-start for action.