The Other Railway Children, Chapter 10 "Pilot Projects in Latin America and East Africa"

As a second pilot area in Latin America we joined forces with another NGO met through the Consortium for Street Children, Casa Alianza. Although Casa Alianza was a major USA NGO under the name ‘Covenant House’, it had a Central American programme part financed by Casa Alianza UK, whose Director was Fred Shortland whom I’d known for many years - he was another member of the Children’s Human Rights Network Committee that I joined at Amnesty back in 1990. Casa Alianza had been well to the fore in defending street children’s rights through legal processes, identifying and accusing the police authorities in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras when street children were found abused, tortured or murdered by the police or condoned by them. Casa Alianza had been generous to Railway Children in sharing information about funding sources and we had reciprocated.

We therefore chose Casa Alianza as a potential partner and agreed to fund their outreach work on the street in Guatemala City for three years. As part of our sharing and learning programme, our India Country Director, Mrinalini Rao, and Andy McCullough, our UK Policy & Strategy Officer, spent time in Guatemala City looking at the programme. They were horrified to find that one of the weekly duties of the Programme Officer there was a visit to the mortuary to identify any bodies of street children who had died during the previous week - most murdered or shot in the regular battles and conflict between the police and street gangs. Not all the children were innocent of gang involvement - often the gangs were the only people who showed them respect and acted as family for them - but many younger street children would get caught just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Andy McCullough was warned to cover up his numerous tattoos for fear of being mistaken by the police as a gang member and shot first before questions asked - and this was perhaps not just an idle threat!

Our third pilot area was East Africa. We had ceased funding Pendekezo Letu when another of their partners, ChildHope UK, had obtained a substantial two year EU grant for the programme which included everything we had been previously funding and we looked elsewhere. I visited Nairobi regularly for family reasons and was pointed in the direction of the Undugu Society in the city as that organisation had been the key link when the CSC had funded an East African conference of NGOs working for street children several years previously.

The Undugu Society had been founded by a Dutch priest in 1973 and had grown to be one of the largest NGOs for children in Kenya - it also had other activities including being a major conduit for ‘fair trade’ produce. I met Josephine Mulu who was in charge of their children’s programme, who explained the size of the street children problem in the city, with many lone children arriving from the remote rural areas for reasons such as extreme poverty, famine, and violence, while the huge slums of Kibera and the like in the city spawned many children who spent their lives scavenging and surviving in the alleyways of the slums or begging in the city centre.

The Undugu Society had three residential centres for street children, holding at maximum around 200 children and they were well aware of the inadequacy of this when the city authorities estimated 60,000 street children in the city and 250,000 in the country. They therefore put a revolutionary plan to Railway Children which involved the closure of two of the residential centres, though one would be retained as a training centre. The other one remaining at Kitengela, about 90 minutes’ road journey out of the city, would act as a short term rehabilitation centre for younger street children prior to home/community repatriation.

The main thrust of their proposals was to support the formation of thirty ‘associations’ of street youth who would be formally recognised; who would choose their leaders who would receive training in their roles by Undugu; who would meet regularly, formulate their own rules; have an association bank account and whom Undugu would help to find legitimate work and would protect from police harassment. In return, the association members would look out for new lone children arriving in the city and bring them to Undugu for rehabilitation at Kitengela and family reintegration.

Pete Kent developed this concept with the Undugu Society and also linked with the International Childcare Trust, another CSC member, to part fund an NGO, KYPT, working in Kitale, in northern Kenya which received many street children from the rural area around and further north which was subject to frequent drought and famine. The operation of this NGO, the only one working for street children in Kitale, was often difficult, but Railway Children decided to persevere when the other CSC member pulled out. In recent months the Undugu ‘association’ model has become a Kenyan movement, with over 170 groups being formed almost spontaneously in Kisumu as well as all districts of Nairobi, more than the Undugu Society can train or support. They are therefore training other NGOs, including KYPT in Kitale, to develop and oversee this innovative initiative.

Pete Kent had contacts from his pre-Railway Children life in Tanzania and he researched possible partners in that country. The scale of the street children phenomenon in Tanzania was not as great as in Kenya - the children were numbered in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands - but the problem was growing and there was the opportunity to try to stem the flow before it increased to unmanageable proportions. One of the biggest NGOs for street children in Tanzania, Mkombozi, in the cities of Moshi and Arusha, was run by a British woman, Kate McAlpine, who had engaged with the Tanzanian government to protest about the periodic round-up of street children undertaken by the police under ancient colonial laws about loitering and vagrancy.

Railway Children agreed to fund some advocacy work by Mkombozi around this law and police actions and took an interest in a joint CSC project with some of its East African members that undertook action research in a slum community notorious as a source of street living children, which was funded by the Baring Trust. As a result of this, a minister in the Tanzanian government asked the CSC to undertake some survey work in eight Tanzanian cities to gauge the size of the problem and to organise a conference on the issue and potential solutions as a prelude to the forming of a national strategy on street children. Railway Children conducted the survey in the city of Mwanza in conjunction with a local street working NGO there, Adilisha, and subsequently formed a partnership with that NGO to fund their street operations and to become heavily involved in the CSC initiative with the Tanzanian government.

Pete Kent, as the Programme Officer for the ‘Rest of the World’ would monitor carefully the outcomes from the programmes in Russia, Central America and East Africa and with Terina,our Chief Executive, produce recommendations after three years on which continent to develop a major expansion to join the substantial body of work we were continuing to strengthen in India and the UK.

The Board subsequently met to consider the pilot projects, their outcomes and where we should concentrate our resources in the next phase of the charity’s development. We had ceased funding the ‘Love Russia’ shelter projects in Moscow and the Siberia Chita scheme where our input had been primarily of a capital nature and had concentrated our resources there in the NAN partnership. The project showed valuable contacts made with children at the Moscow stations and an innate suspicion of the railway and civil police which our NAN and Medecin sans Frontières staff struggled at first to overcome and gain the children’s trust. However, we were making progress and the action research pointed to the value of establishing social workers at these stations to contact the children initially and only involve the police if a crime had been committed by the runaway child.

Agreement was reached that state funded social workers would be trained by NAN to act as the front line contacts for these children and would establish their reasons for running away and the best options for their future. However, the problems then encountered between the railway ministry responsible for the station environment and the ministry responsible for the police made the progress of the project difficult and we held further funding back until the issue had been resolved (it still hasn’t been). This made the difficulties of working in the former Soviet Union, with its bureaucratic state culture, a low priority for our further expansion. It was clear that voluntary work in Russia could only be effectively done in partnership with the State - frankly the priority was to make the creaking state systems operate properly rather than setting up an alternative voluntary sector system.

We were working with two contrasting NGOs in Central America. We had funded Juconi in Mexico for over ten years and we had learned much from their intensive child rehabilitation process which we thought we might test in other parts of our programmes. The sheer numbers of children we were contacting in India made such a staff / child ratio almost prohibitively expensive although we thought that Juconi’s methods could be tried in countries where the street children problem had not reached such endemic proportions. Our programme with Casa Alianza in Guatemala was of interest and badly needed, dealing as it did with children who were at risk of being caught up in the gang culture and often murdered, but we had little experience of working with such children, our input basically being that of funding - important, but there was little opportunity for us to use our experience and knowledge to add value otherwise to the partners we were funding.

In contrast, African NGOs were struggling with little support or input from their governments and locally based NGOs were often in need of support and advice as well as funds. This seemed a situation closely resembling our experience in India and where we felt we had knowledge and the resources to make a significant impact. The Board therefore decided to accept the recommendations from Pete Kent and our Chief Executive to close or put on hold our partnerships in America and Eastern Europe, completing our agreed funding cycles only, and look at developing our East Africa programmes in Kenya and Tanzania for a start, with a view to increasing from four to six partner projects within a year or so and the setting up of an African Railway Children office in Nairobi or Dar-es-Salaam to mirror the development of the programme in India with the long term intention of supporting an East African programme of similar size and impact.