The Other Railway Chilren, "My Vision for the Future"

This brings me to my vision for the future of the ‘Railway Children’ charity. The Board has a clear strategy for the development of our work in the three main geographical spheres of operation - India, East Africa and the United Kingdom - and I am wholeheartedly behind these policies. I can do no better than refer you to an edited version of these three strategies in the Railway Children website (www.railwaychildren.org.uk). They were written by our senior staff - Pete Kent, Programme Officer for East Africa, Mrinalini Rao, Country Director India and her Programme Manager Navin Sellaraju, and Andy McCullough, Policy & Strategy Officer, UK, all under the direction and supervision of Terina Keene, Chief Executive. My role in these has been just the same as any other Board Member - to receive, test and approve them through discussions on trustee ‘Away Days’ and Board Meetings.

I’m therefore not directly including these in my reflections in this book as they are the official policies and strategies of the charity for the next three years until 2013. These owe much to the skill and experience of these staff and their colleagues and the Railway Children charity is very fortunate to have been able to recruit such people and retain them. In the next and final chapter I shall attempt to place on record the reasons why I think the Railway Children has been successful and the competence and motivation of our staff will be highlighted as one of the key reasons.

Before I expand on a few thoughts of my own about the future and some of the most interesting potential developments, I’d like to pay tribute to some of Terina’s strategic thinking which has evolved over her time with us. She has developed with the staff our fundamental concept on which the charity is building its future strategies - what she calls the ‘three step change agenda’. Fundamentally, our intention is to make positive sustainable change in the lives of children who are alone and at risk and we must do this at three levels:

We need to create short term change by meeting the immediate needs of street children through activating and influencing child friendly, safe spaces, people and practices. That is, we are protecting these children from immediate abuse and exploitation and offering them options for development and family reintegration.

Secondly, at a family and community level, we need to promote a longer term supportive environment so that children can develop to their full potential without stigmatisation and realise their rights as set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. We need to engage with stakeholders in the cities and rural areas and the poorest communities from which many of these children come.

Thirdly, at the national level, we need to promote the implementation of child friendly laws and policies and conduct advocacy to ensure governments carry out their responsibilities to the most vulnerable children, especially those who have taken to the streets or are at risk of doing so.

We are therefore seeking to tackle the emergency needs of children and open up development options for them; prevent them leaving home if possible and reintegrate them into their own communities if they have run away wherever possible; and to influence national policies to ensure the most vulnerable children are given the opportunities that should be available for any child without discrimination. To accomplish the third objective, we need to use the evidence that we’ve gathered in the work we undertake to fulfil our roles in the first two levels.

Railway Children was founded to promote and implement the concept of early intervention. Because of my experience and the incident that stimulated my action, I saw this initially as linked to railway stations as children arrived in the cities, having run away or been abandoned. Over the years we have widened our understanding of early intervention as this varies in different countries, but have stayed focused on that intervention principle.

We are now beginning to explore what I call ‘early early’ intervention - ie prevention, which is the real message of the TQM approach I’d adopted in the latter years of my railway career. In the late 1990s I had identified certain projects for Railway Children support in the slums alongside railway tracks - particularly in Calcutta. We had withdrawn from these over the years because the children involved, although in great need, still lived with their families and support for them needed a more holistic approach than we could resource.

Railway Children is now looking at re-engaging in some of the areas from which the children come, but rather than being the resource to bring the whole community out of poverty and provide decent facilities - a role for government and the large international aid agencies - we see it as an opportunity to educate children and their communities about the dangers of children running away or being offered ‘opportunities’ by traffickers. This means also identifying some of the factors which cause children in these situations to feel that they are better off or safer away from home and therefore the education of parents in difficulty in the principles of good child care and seeking support from the whole community in supporting children at risk in their midst.

This is a huge undertaking and Railway Children, with other NGOs, can only indicate through their experience in a few pilot projects what governments might achieve on a much larger scale by replication. It will require networking with other NGOs, especially the larger ones like Save the Children and UNICEF who are in many cases already working in such communities and other aid agencies such as Water Aid or Christian Aid who may be in the communities undertaking clean water provision or agricultural support. We need to link with them to help the village and urban slum inhabitants they are supporting watch over their children too and create stable communities, to both protect children and reduce their risk of running away and receive and support children returning to their families after a period on the streets.

In some countries like India this means greater interaction with the country’s development of the Child Welfare Committees and Juvenile Justice Boards and support and education of those appointed in those key roles. In most countries in Africa no such state support exists and a network of NGOs, large and small, will need to cooperate together in providing such coverage whilst using their advocacy resources to lobby governments to put comprehensive child safeguarding systems in place. As Railway Children gets experience of what works, it will be in a good position to document the evidence and share this with the larger agencies and governments to replicate good practice on a much larger scale.

This applies as much in the UK as elsewhere. The research that Railway Children has undertaken on UK ‘detached’ children has been made widely available to other British NGOs and it is our hope that many organisations will act on the findings and recommendations. We do not have - at the moment anyway - the resources to implement all our ideas ourselves and through the partnership with Aviva and possibly other British firms I would hope that we can demonstrate effective ways forward that can be picked up by the large NGOs like the NSPCC, Barnardo’s and Action for Children (the former NCH) and of course, influence the British government despite the problems caused by the current recession as the costs of ignoring the problem on Britain’s streets is in the long run much higher in both financial and societal terms.

I have always been a strong advocate of networking and have deliberately joined many groups set up to coordinate policies and advocacy work - the Consortium for Street Children, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Child Rights Panel and Department for International Development Advisory Groups. I have taken every opportunity to attend conferences and make contacts with academics and politicians. Sometimes we tend to test the effectiveness of joining groups by assessing what value we can get out of them. I believe we should also use such groups and contacts as a means of influencing others to take action to help children in ways which we have found by experience to be effective. We can use our research, our evidence, the skills and experience we have acquired to share with others for the larger benefit of vulnerable children. We should not try to guard such knowledge for our own organisation’s benefit just using it to compete for funds in the limited voluntary sector pot.

Another possible model for greater networking is one I learned from a member of the Consortium for Street Children. I have in an earlier chapter referred to talks we had with the Viva Network but were unable to enter into a closer relationship because of our reluctance to be tied to their religious theology and principles. However, I shared my vision of early intervention with them, describing our Indian methodology, and one of Viva Network’s partners, Toybox, a member of the CSC, set out to pilot comprehensive early intervention at one city in Bolivia, Cochabamba, which had a growing but potentially containable problem with street children.

Their intention was to bring all the NGOs working with vulnerable children in the city - about fifteen if I remember rightly - together with the municipal authorities and the city’s church congregations (the Roman Catholic Church has a strong presence in the national culture) and between them identify all the locations where potentially new children might appear on the street. This meant tapping routes by which children from rural areas might arrive and also the slums in the city and on its outskirts where vulnerable children and their families live. One of the strengths of the CSC is to encourage its members to share their experiences of such innovative work so that others may join or replicate it where possible.

I would like to see a thorough evaluation of projects like these (it may have been done in which case I’d like to see and learn from it) and it could be of possible application to moderate sized cities in other parts of the world where the number of street children is not yet out of control. I initiated a meeting of CSC members working in East Africa recently and I know Pete Kent is working on possible joint projects with some other British partners in Kenya and Tanzania - we already work with others in funding and supporting Mkombozi in Tanzania and are part of the CSC support to the Tanzanian government ministry developing a national plan for street children.

I believe that our attempt to develop coordination between NGOs working on stations in India is one where we must persevere, despite the problems. My vision of voluntary work for street children at a large Indian station is for a network of local NGOs to establish a joint ‘child assistance booth’ (as at Vijayawada), manned by people from the participating NGOs on a rota basis, facilitated by the railway police (RPF and GRP), supported by all the station staff, stall holders and travelling public, and where the long term child residents on the station have been found legitimate work, and have been encouraged to act as outreach workers to contact and bring new arriving children to the child assistance booth.

I would envisage the agencies at the booth having contacts with all NGOs in the area and knowledge of the programmes of each - their strengths and specialisms, who has medical facilities, who works with girls, who has appropriate vocational training, who has the capacity to undertake therapeutic counselling, drug de-addiction, who is best able to prepare children to go home and see that they are safe where this is practicable. The volunteer or NGO staff member on duty at the ‘CAB’ would then meet the immediate needs of the child and refer them to the NGO that best seems to fit their need, rather than automatically take responsibility for the child in their own NGO. I was delighted to find on my most recent visit, outlined in the previous chapter, that this is indeed beginning to happen at certain key stations.

I just mentioned my ideal of harnessing street youth to act as the eyes and ears of NGOs on stations and be the first contact with lone children arriving, in order to bring them support and help rather than - as is often the case now - absorbing them in their gangs, subjecting them to abuse and corrupting them by introducing them to drugs and other nefarious ways of survival. The railway authorities and police are most frustrated by this group of youths and expect NGOs to take them and keep them away from the stations just as much as the newcomers, a forlorn hope. NGOs find having such damaged and often criminalised young people in their shelters frightens other younger children or introduces them quickly to behaviours that are dangerous and injurious. There have been many cases where a former street child has acted as an outreach worker for a station based charity, either informally or employed to do so.

One example of this was ‘Santosh’ who featured in the January 2010 Channel 4 Dispatches documentary entitled ‘The Real Slumdog Children’ - he had lived for years on Bombay VT station, then had been helped by a Bombay NGO and had worked with Railway Children in some admin and outreach roles. Santosh had his own business now and was doing well but still looked out for the street children to offer help.

Railway Children is currently partnering one African NGO where this type of working is being piloted on a much larger scale. I mentioned the ‘association model’ being developed by the Undugu Society in Nairobi in chapter 10, where older street youths are being encouraged to form groups of 25 or so and be trained to become a cooperative and viable unit engaged in law abiding work, using their knowledge and experience to identify newly arriving children and bringing them to the NGO for rehabilitation, counselling and return to their communities before being absorbed into the street culture.

It is too soon to see how successful this is overall, although I have seen examples where this has operated in a very positive way. The concept has appealed to large numbers of street youth in the Kenyan capital and already spread to the city of Kisumu on Lake Victoria at such a rate that it has become difficult for the NGO to control all the outcomes, but it appears to be working effectively in enough cases for it to be properly evaluated and provided with the resources to make it effective in a larger number of cases.

Many countries have huge problems with the gang culture of street youth and girls and there may be something significant to learn about how to turn such gangs into a positive force. A first step is to pay the young people involved the respect of listening to them and trying to understand their problems and offering help instead of condemning them and stigmatising them without further thought as so much of the media does and often the police also, condoned or backed by those in society who have not had their poverty of upbringing.

I have mentioned ‘evaluation’ several times in this chapter. There is increasing recognition by NGOs that they need to demonstrate the longterm effectiveness of what they are doing. The days when one could satisfy donors and grant-makers by providing information on numbers of children supported and the numbers involved in education or vocational training is passing. We need to know the impact of the education, the ability of children who have had vocational training to get jobs for which they’ve been trained, to know that children returned home are still there months and years later and free of the problems that caused them to run away. This type of performance monitoring is difficult for most charitable activities but especially so for such a mobile group as street children. We need to know whether the positive changes in a child’s life are real and sustainable.

Therefore I foresee that it will be increasingly important to document our work - conduct base line surveys so that the impact throughout a programme can be compared with the start point, document the changes made and follow up to see the results well after the activity. All major grant-makers now allow costs of independent evaluations to be calculated as part of the grant. I see the role of organisations like the Consortium for Street Children to develop with its partners meaningful indicators and researched statistics that provide the evidence for future policies. Organisations like Railway Children will need to undertake research itself to ensure that their projects and programmes are based on hard evidence and not the immediate symptoms of problems.

In the light of such a statement, what evidence do we have of the difference Railway Children has made in the lives of children over the last 15 years? We can quote numbers - we are contacting around 25,000 children a year in 2010 through our Indian, East African and UK partner programmes. I estimate that we have probably contacted in a significant way more than 200,000 over the lifetime of the charity and many more if one counts the numbers for whom a casual contact has been made through a phone conversation or advice given by an outreach worker on a railway station or in the street.

Some of our partners can tell us how many children were mainstreamed to government schools or passed exams or completed vocational training. We know that in the last three or four years we have reunited about a quarter of the children we’ve contacted in India with their own families. But we have to do a lot more in the follow-up to ensure we really know that the change we’ve brought about is real and long-lasting. This is a challenge for us and other NGOs working for vulnerable and street living children.

Soon after I joined Amnesty’s Working Group for Children I undertook an analysis of the number of UN Convention on the Rights of the Child articles that were regularly violated for street children by state authorities, the public and families - it came to around 50% of the 41 articles approved and ratified by 192 out of the 193 nations who are members of the United Nations. Our aim should be to ensure that street children and children at risk of taking to the street should be protected in just the same way, without discrimination, enjoying all their human rights outlined in the CRC as should all children. Perhaps we should be holding countries accountable under each of these 41 articles, measuring the extent, by country, to which they are firstly, enshrined in law, and secondly robustly implemented.

At the end of the day, however, we can only do what is within our reach, but by combining with others we can make that reach extend further. The problem is huge. The solutions come one child at a time. I often wonder what the little Bombay girl who inspired the founding of the charity would have made of it all. She would be about 27 now. Is she still alive? Is she still a beggar – or prostitute? Does she have a family and live on the street? Or did some organisation rescue her and give her the opportunity that we’ve tried to provide for the children we contact? Is it even possible that, unknown to me, she benefited from one of our programmes?