I. Overview

The planet has become an overwhelmingly urbanized environment in the 15 years since Street Kids International was born. Estimates of the number of street youth vary but conservative numbers from UNICEF suggest 100 million and growing. In some of the countries where we work, they “represent 30-40% of the population between the ages of 10 and 20 years of age.

The numbers are not about to decrease soon. The conditions which cause children to flee to the streets are not diminishing and the streets of our cities are not becoming more hospitable.

We believe that street involved youth are “missing” from the agendas of many of the international agencies and that this population is the “Lost Decade” of development programming and investment. What do we mean by this? We under invest in them both intellectually and financially and both domestically and internationally. We find them difficult, unpredictable and inaccessible – physically and emotionally. They do not come to our offices and ask for help. They fail to conform to our stereotypes about how children should behave and the appropriate role of adults in their lives. Because they are a difficult target population we have avoided the challenges of learning how to successfully invest in them. It is easier in a relative sense, to focus on the inoculations and nutritional needs of children under five who are compliant recipients of our assistance. We have also been relatively successful in focusing attention on literacy and numeracy skill building through primary education of children 5 to 10 years of age who willingly attend school when it is offered. However, these investments are put at risk as we “drop” kids for the next decade of their transition from childhood to adulthood, until ten years later, when they become mothers or adult heads of households in need of training and employment.

They have also been missed because the early decades of development have had a distinctly rural focus. The expertise and experience have not been developed for working in the cities and street involved youth are a distinctly urban phenomena. In the cities, the traditional pillars upon which development programmes have been anchored – extended families, intact and relatively immobile populations, homogeneous communities, adult headed households and land, however meager, as an asset base, are gone. Our public policies presume a stability of fixed addresses, civil identities, birth records and traditional family units that may not exist in urban areas.

To be successful in the cities of the planet and with this particular population in the city requires a whole new set of skills and investments.

II. Street Kids International

Street Kids International (SKI) has been consistent and for many years unique in its focus on working with street involved youth. At Street Kids International, we believe that the ones who are difficult to access are not the youth but ourselves our programmes and our institutions. We believe we need a paradigm shift in adult-adolescent relationships, away from experts with lists of do’s and don’ts and dire warnings, and away from rescuers of children from situations that do not fit our model of what child hood should be. Despite their chronological age, street youth have been placed in adult roles and need adult forms of engagement that acknowledge their situations, coping skills, innate strength and resilience. Success at working with street kids requires active, interactive and non-judgmental engagement.

Street Kids International was born in Sudan in 1985 when the founder of Street Kids International encountered the street youth of Khartoum, who had fled alone from the armies and militias in the countryside during the early days of that civil war and found themselves in Khartoum with no resources and no adults left in their lives. Struck by their stories and resilience and frustrated by the unwillingness of major donors to take on this population, the early principles and practices of Street Kids International took shape. Over the past 15 years, we have worked globally with street involved youth, youth workers and local front line organizations who share our commitment to working creatively with these kids with a different lens – one whose point of departure is to view them as resources and assets to build on. Our evolution in thinking and practices from this point of departure, always using the street and it’s citizens as a learning laboratory, has governed the decisions and choices of Street Kids International organizationally over the years.

III. The Context

Understanding the context for what "makes" a street kid is not simple. It is a complex set of factors that cause youth to take to the streets which include war, conflict, abuse, poverty, family breakdown, rebellion and income needs. The phenomenon of street involved youth crosses borders and boundaries and is replete with myths, stigmas and stereotypes.

Most importantly there is no one way to adequately capture a population that spans a spectrum that includes street living (homeless) youth, street involved youth (generally not homeless in a traditional sense) and street based working children. Some of the youth we work with are connected to a family situation and return there regularly, some have some degree of family connection that they attempt to maintain and others have no family connection or adult support. Some have no institutional connection to education, some may have a tentative or slight formal connection to an educational institution.

Even definitions by age do not adequately capture this population. We ask ourselves is it chronological age or is it behavioral expectations that may be culturally or societally derived that define children and youth. The youth we work with globally range from 8 years to about 24 years of age though both ends of the range beyond the second decade of youth (10 to 20 years of age) tends to be less precise. In fact, age is also somewhat country dependant. In the developing countries of Africa, street kids tend to be younger which may also reflect the prevalence of HIV/AIDS orphans as well as refugees. In the transitional countries of the Former Soviet Union and Central Asia, the ages we encounter are somewhat older.

IV. Why Street Kids are Not Yet on the Agenda

We believe a combination of factors have prevented strategic interventions on behalf of street kids to occur by the major international players but two in particular are the most significant constraints: (1) the urban nature of the problem; and (2) the myths, stigmas and stereotypes of adolescence itself.

i) Urbanization

The accelerated pace of urbanization, as a development challenge, is a relatively recent phenomenon of the past 30 years. Our expertise and the targets of official development assistance have been largely rural. As a result the anchors with which we have successfully built best practices in development have distinct rural characteristics which are lacking in an urban setting: relatively secure land tenure versus insecure and often unpredictable tenancies in the cities; extended, stable families versus broken families with husbands or wives split or left behind in a rural setting; a culturally-socially homogeneous population with strong traditions versus a heterogeneous, culturally diverse population without the ties of kinship and tradition.

The immediate challenge is for us to acquire the necessary understanding and awareness of urban culture and to build new pillars for urban interventions. This will require substantial investments in research and the collection of longitudinal data so that programmatic investments are made on a solid, empirical foundation going forward.

ii) Adolescence

We tend to divide the first decade of life into segments: early childhood being 0-5 years of age and childhood being 5-10 years of age. We have developed very sophisticated support interventions for these two age groups. We also have appropriately targeted the third decade of life with employment strategies, material and maternity support and counseling mechanisms. The second decade of life, the 10-20 year old demographic we miss. We do not fully understand the dynamics of this age group. We tend not to be confident about how to intervene or programme in a proactive, constructive way and, interventions are necessarily complicated. We know the benchmarks for 0-5 and 5-10 years of age. We know what success looks and feels like for this younger age group. For the adolescent decade, development is less linear. Working with this group requires a greater comfort with risk taking than donors are typically comfortable with. This population is less appreciative and their needs are more expensive and time consuming to programme into. They do not fit into traditional and mechanical outcome measures. Furthermore, the measures we currently capture are mostly negatives: the number of youth who do not use drugs, do not engage in unprotected sex, do not engage in criminal conduct, etc. It is difficult to measure, let alone prove, a negative.

Many say we do invest in youth and point to dollars spent and the campaigns and policy statements about youth and drugs, youth and sex and youth and violence. This reflects a poverty of vision and policy and is only an agenda for social control whose instruments currently range from prisons to schools and from criminality to social exclusion of youth.

The product of this narrow public policy approach is the dramatically, increasing populations of street involved and marginalized youth. In countries, where young people find themselves in a maelstrom of rapid social and economic change and dislocation they find themselves at the edge and are at significant risk of being drawn into extremist movements in response to the alienation and abandonment they experience.

Out of school, out of work, dislocated and disconnected youth in volatile regions are just the kind of "lost generation" that extremist groups look to when recruiting new members. As one young Tajik shared with us during work in 1999 in Tajikistan.

"You have heard about "war effected children" the orphans, the homeless, the refugees. Well, my friends and I are "peace affected youth" when the civil war ended and they did not need us to fight, they forgot about us-no schools, no jobs, nothing. They will only think about us again when they want us to fight the Uzbeks or the Kyrgys or someone else we must hate…"

There is a broad consensus with the youth-serving sector in many of the transitional countries that they are witnessing a disturbing convergence of two phenomena. First, the collapse of long-standing centralized political and economic structures leaves youth aged 10-20 facing acute social upheaval during a life stage, when personal support, social stability and guidance from family and community are crucial.

Second, while witnessing social aberration and related risk behaviors among these youth, the institutions that serve them (both government and non-government) are themselves experiencing significant instability and uncertainty. While a chronic lack of stable funding remains a constant concern, there is also a growing recognition that, in terms of government policy, professional development and institutional capacity, the majority of youth-serving agencies lack the public policy frameworks, service delivery models and practical tools required to meet the needs and expectations of this new generation of young people.

Little coherent vision exists on how to harness this immense demographic asset and offer meaningful and positive policy alternatives that acknowledge the energy and resilience of these young people.

Street Kids International takes the approach that adolescence is a process of building human assets. The behaviors of young people should be ranged on a normative scale that may not fit an adult view of ideal childhood/adolescence but is nevertheless within a perfectly normative frame for adolescence.

Shifting the adult-child paradigm is essential to be successful in supporting this demographic age group. This requires not seeing adults as "experts" whose role it is, is to transfer knowledge down to adolescents. It means rethinking notions of an idealized childhood that is beyond the reach of most of the youth of the world. And, it requires us to stop thinking of youth as adults in waiting.

V. Street "Choices"

We have taken these principles and began by addressing some of the most obvious challenges faced by street kids – their reproductive health and most importantly the impact of HIV/AIDS on their lives. This was in the mid to late 1980’s, long before there was any attention and little understanding of this virus. Early successes with our approaches led to being asked and supported to create a street based approach to substance abuse directed at street youth. We captured this early work under the description of “Street Health”. In more recent years we have closed the loop between the health risks and the economic needs of street kids by creating a business learning process specifically designed for youth who are at risk. We drew on the years of learning and best practices in micro enterprise and micro credit directed at marginalized populations such as women, and created a set of enterprise training materials reflective of the cognitive, literacy and numeric skills of street based working youth. It builds on the innate skills that come from street survival. We describe this area of programming as “Street Work”.

Over the years, the rights of street youth (“Street Rights”) has emerged as an overlying challenge to life on the street. While we acknowledge the significance and importance of human rights treaties and legislation, in our street based practice, we believe that the denial of the positive rights of street youth requires more attention – their right to work, their right to access available health care without adult consent, their right to be free from criminal sanctions due to lack of a birth registration or other civil identity often caused by reason of being parentless from a young age. Working with police, local governments and in particular municipal governments, health clinicians and youth court workers whose attitudes, biases and perceptions can impact the day to day lives and rights of youth who live and or work on the streets of our cities, is an important part of programming interventions on behalf of street youth.

This programmatic or content side of our work is captured descriptively as “Street Choices”. This is intentional and reflective of the most important part of what we do, which is how we approach our work. Our interaction with street youth is based not on a traditional pedagogy of transferring knowledge or facts but rather on opening up of the dialogue around the choices they are making and how to enlarge the range of safe choices they might otherwise choose to make.

VI Some Street Practices

• Changing the Paradigm

Street Kids International has always been anchored in a practice based approach to our own organizational learning. We believe that street youth need support and opportunities to make safe and healthy life choices. They do not need prescriptive directions or dire warnings about unsafe sex, drugs or disease by adult “experts”. Most of what we know and have learned comes from listening to street kids in nearly every country of the world.

Our pedagogical approach to working with street youth is to deliberately shift the paradigm of traditional adult-child relationships. This means in our work not approaching youth as an adult expert with information, knowledge and experience to transfer, nor coming as an adult wanting to save the remnants of a childhood long gone or to recreate an adult sense of an idealized child hood. We do not start from the premise that street youth are children to be protected, liabilities to be controlled or threats to be isolated. The use of exclusion, stigmatization and criminality to handle the growing population of street involved youth is a no win proposition.

We see street youth as resources and assets with unique street derived skills and innate qualities of strength, resilience and adaptability.

To tap into this resource means treating the street both as a place and a metaphor. For some, it is a place of escape from family breakdown, poverty, abuse and conflict, for many a place to earn money, to support themselves or siblings, for others it is a space to go to for non-judgmental peer support.

The motivations, the pushes and pulls that result in lives characterized by street involvement are many and complex. The approaches to building street based lives are neither simple or short term. It is about developing healthy, young adults who can make safe and wise decisions.

• The Use of Narrative and Stories

Street Kids International has learned, through fifteen years of meeting the world’s street youth, that one of the most effective ways to create a learning environment is through storytelling. Specifically, we share fictional stories (in business school language these would be called case studies) that have street youth as their main characters.

We use these stories to create a space where lived stories can be shared safely. We have found that street youth are comfortable discussing their thoughts and experiences in reference to a “fictional” story’s characters and plot, that mirrors their own thoughts and experiences, without having to disclose personal information until they feel ready.

For example, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, Street Kids International produced two animated films: Karate Kids, which addresses HIV/AIDS and the sex trade, and Goldtooth, which addresses substance abuse. Each video portrays the lives of street youth -- their humour, their friendships, their abuse, and their exploitation. At first criticized for their explicit content, these videos soon became internationally recognized and awarded for their capacity to facilitate dialogues with street-involved youth.

The videos were not designed to define the signs and symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases or drug addiction. Many programs and materials already provide these facts in abundance. Instead, the videos aim to act as a medium that adults and street youth can share in common and discuss openly. Youth workers play the videos with groups of street youth and, on a second viewing, stop the video at various points to hear the group’s thoughts on the characters and plot. This is not a comprehension quiz, nor an interrogation; it is a time for sharing and non-judgmental listening. Through these dialogues street youth have shared why the sex trade sometimes appeals to them, how drugs help them get through the night, who sells them their drugs, and what they fear most and want most. Through these dialogues street youth have the opportunity, sometimes their first, to openly contemplate the daily risks and decisions they take and to discuss safer lifestyle alternatives and choices with an adult who listens to their perspectives and respects their self-determination.

Why invest so much effort in hearing about street kids lived experiences? In international development, the rich dialogues that lead to authentic progress occur when individuals share power and speak candidly with the aim of advancing a common cause. It is no different when the target population is youth. That’s why everything we create is co-created with street youth and youth workers and then tested and re-tested in different geographies and settings with them, so it mirrors the situations, conflicts and challenges of growing up on the street.

We have learned that unlike adults, youth are less likely to divide the world by cultures and geographies when the subject is their lives. They are quick to see the common features of youth culture and street life that for them transcend differences in national culture. Materials created in Bolivia are translated by Tajiks for use with youth there. Practices that have been trialed in Africa are documented by Thais for use in South East Asia. The animations and materials we have produced have been translated, versioned and adapted in languages and countries all over the world without our knowledge, input or the need for our consent. At last count, Karate Kids had been translated into 31 languages and was being used in most countries of the world.

• Stories and Education

If we give street-involved youth a voice, it only creates power where that voice is welcomed and heard. Often this does not extend beyond the street or a community center where they are able to meet with youth workers who respect them.

Street-involved youth are among today’s 1.04 billion youth, aged 15 to 24 (UNFPA). These youth will become the largest generation to enter adulthood (UNESCO) and will largely determine the global economy. In the second half of the decade of adolescence, their economic needs and potential must be addressed. In countries with the highest levels of HIV/AIDS, the percentage of youth forced to assume roles as surrogate parents and primary income earners for their families is exploding. UNICEF estimates that by the year 2010, an estimated 106 million children under the age of 15 are projected to have lost one or both parents, with 25 million of this group, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, orphaned due to HIV/AIDS. This number will continue to rise for the next two decades due to the rhythm and pacing of the disease. In these and other developing countries, youth livelihoods must be a priority.

Some street-involved youth use the sex trade, drug trade, theft, and begging to make money. Many sell goods on street corners, at bus stops, and outside downtown shops. They make enough to survive, sometimes, but usually their income does not grow nor enable them to improve their quality of life. We know that a street kid with a little money can find a family. An

extended family member who may not have been able to take in a child without risking putting other dependents at risk, will willingly take in another member able to contribute to household income. A street youth with savings or the potential for disposable income will make choices about going to school full or part time. A street kid with a micro-enterprise becomes a member of a community that may have seen him as shiftless, threatening or simply transient and not worth investing in.

How can we support these youth in building safer and more profitable ways of earning money? Street Kids International has confronted this question through the development and implementation of several micro-credit and business training programs for street-involved youth. The lessons learned from each of these regional programs culminated in the launch of our Street Business Toolkit: a global business training program for youth workers to use with the street youth in their region.

In all of our micro-credit and business training experiences, youth from this resilient population repeatedly demonstrated that they could adapt their street smarts and rapidly learn new business skills and use them for immediate and positive gains in their lives and livelihoods. In order to fully draw upon this potential, we challenged ourselves, in developing the Street Business Toolkit, to identify the most effective way to advance street youth’s business knowledge and understanding, despite their low literacy and numeric skills. We knew from working with street based working children that they already had a “pricing” model in their heads. They knew when they charged too much to sell enough or too little to pay their expenses. They already had a “customer attraction and retention” model – how to win new customers and how to have repeat customers. What they lacked was a conceptual framework that fit their experience and reflected their situation. We quickly realized that instead of starting with definitions and calculations, new business skills were most accessible to street-involved youth when introduced through a story. Much like the oral storytelling tradition, lessons stayed in their memory and prompted new ideas and questions when first introduced through anecdotes about other street youth.

Thus Speed’s Choice was born: an animated video about five street youth encountering the challenges and adventures of running their own small-businesses. The experiences of each character have been further developed into case studies used within an extensive curriculum of interactive activities and worksheets to guide street youth in writing a basic business plan. Each new business concept relates to a character and their story, and each story enables street youth to relate the new business concepts to their own experiences. The stories of youth livelihood need to be continuously captured and told and used to educate investors, such as international development agencies, youth workers and other street based working youth.

We believe that working with street kids in their economic capacity and providing access to credit to enable them to leverage what they already do is an entry point for other interventions such as community participation, political action and where possible re-engagement with adults on a new footing. Building an economic base of any size invests these kids in their communities and stretches out their planning cycles and life skills beyond uninvested day to day survival.

• Stories and Partner Collaborations

The opportunities for youth to acquire new business skills, make healthier life choices and participate in micro-credit extends only so far as the network of institutions and front-line workers prepared to push the frontiers of youth work from crisis intervention and rescue to human development. In many cases, the front-line workers reaching out to street-involved youth, though many experienced street life themselves, seem to have forgotten the type of support and mutuality they sought from adults when they were young. In their professional roles, they use the authoritarian approach they experienced from their teachers and parents; they become adults who judge, warn, and forget to listen in their well-intentioned attempt to transmit information about the risks of street life.

One of Street Kids International’s primary objectives is to advance methods for empowering street-involved youth through collaborations with front-line institutions and staff. We have participated in diverse dialogues, trainings, and consultations with front-line staff from around the world. In all of these interchanges, it ultimately becomes clear that front-line youth workers are a product of the training they receive in schools of social work around the world. SKI is attempting to change the nature and content of social work that ignores or stereotypes street youth. The agenda of youth work still overwhelmingly tends to revolve around the themes of youth and crime, youth and drugs and youth and sex.

In training front-line workers, we have learned that rhetorical discussions about youth-centered methodologies cannot stand alone. Youth-centered rhetoric leads to convincing discussions but little behavior change unless, in addition, youth workers share their personal stories of adult role models from their past and use these memories to explore the approach they will choose for engaging with youth. We do not come with ready answers or off the shelf training materials. In trying to revolutionize global youth work, personal commitment to the processes of youth engagement are essential and have to be modeled in the professional development of youth workers themselves.

Today, our partnership networks produce significant outcomes in their work due to their strong commitment to shared personal experience. Today, the individuals and institutions that we work with use personal experience as a starting point for cross-sharing ideas and developing new and innovative approaches for working with street-involved youth. They are transforming youth work starting from a practice based approach that will increasingly be turned in to curriculum and teaching tools with the right support.

• Stories and Communications

Street Kids International aims to demonstrate street youth’s value to society and to advocate changes to the policies that threaten their rights and freedoms. We also take responsibility for witnessing and informing others about the reality lived by street youth. As long as street-involved youth do not have the public voice that they should by right, we have the responsibility to capture their true experiences as they wish to have them known by a greater public.

We have all winced at the tired stories about street youth, written to provoke pity from donors and sympathy from media. These stories rarely complete the picture of these youth’s lives. They prefer to depict only the street youth abused and abandoned instead of those who choose to run away, determined to make better lives for themselves. They prefer to depict street youth shoeless and begging in the street instead of street youth who invest a small part of their profit in second hand clothes, to appear more professional to their customers. They prefer to depict street youth who combine their daily earnings to buy drugs instead of the street youth who befriend each other to replace the family support they lack.

While it is easier to communicate a one-dimensional view of the reality we have witnessed, we underestimate the public’s ability to appreciate the complexity of the true story. By portraying street youth as helpless victims and poster children instead of as valuable members of society we continue to stigmatize them. Any story written to be provocative rather than complete reinforces the clichés and stereotypes that sets back youth work and the lives of these youth by years.

Taking the time to communicate accurate representations of street youth’s lives builds the authenticity and effectiveness of our work.

If we can ground our engagement of youth, our programs, our advocacy, and our communications in the sharing of stories, lived and witnessed, with all their inherent ambiguity, complexity and contradictions, we advance our work and our relationships on a solid foundation of what is real, challenging, and transformative.

This is a more sophisticated approach to both youth work and international development. It requires a high tolerance for ambiguity on the part of donors and international agencies. Youth work cannot be successful if it is too tidy, too time bound and too bordered.

It is time to put this population onto the agendas of policy makers and of national and international donors. The absolute and relative size of this population will continue to accelerate for the next 25 years. Urbanization, demographic growth of this cohort, HIV/AIDS orphans and the assumption of continued local and regional armed conflicts that drive youth to the relative safety of the city will demand smart, efficient responses.

Critical thinking and empirical research needs to precede investment. The simplest responses will be to focus on emergency responses such as shelter, food and vocational training. It is easier to see these youth as appropriate targets for charity, protection and rescue rather that as investment targets.

We want the “Lost Decade” to be discovered, so they are able to access their fair share of social and economic investment. How can this take place?

• First and foremost a major shift in the attitudes and prejudices that limit potential and impoverish the vision of adolescents as strong, capable, resilient risk-takers must occur. This requires working with the judges, police, court workers, healthcare workers and all those who impact most directly the youth service sector.

• Good data, both quantitative and qualitative as well as case studies and well-documented pilot projects that are able to break boundaries and take risks need to be supported.

• We need a focus on institutional capacity building at the municipal government level. While it is important to work at the micro or street level to be grounded in best practices and it is important to stay connected at the national or macro level where treaties and large investment decisions are made, it is the meso-level where municipalities operate that is the axis where practitioners and policy makers can leverage influence and major change can occur.

• We need a focus on the professional development of youth serving agencies and youth workers. The sector needs to be professionalized through strengthening schools of social work, some of whom need to build institutional experience and their reputations around street youth.

• We need to use the laws of human and civil rights as a framework and press for the positive, citizenship rights of street kids: their right to work, to earn a living, to access health care.

• It will require programmatic interventions that will probably divide the decade into two halves. From 10 to 15 years of age, the focus needs to be centered on their reproductive health, but also, recognize that even by this age many of the children are working full time on the streets supporting themselves, siblings and parents. Often the child pushed to the street to work is not the eldest but rather the one seen by the parents as likely to survive and succeed by reason of character and personality. From 15 to 20 years of age, the focus needs to shift to strengthening capabilities around economic livelihood. Many of the youth are already sole income earners and heads of household. Where they are not supporting existing family members, they are beginning to form their own family units, taking on partners and becoming parents.

• It will require an acknowledgement that the youth service sector has many participants and is in itself a formal sector that comprises social workers, court workers, health clinicians, educators, the police and municipal governments whose policies, regulatory decisions and attitudes directly impact street kids. They need to be included in the planning and execution of programmatic initiatives in this area if we want systemic change.

• It will not require new micro-credit institutions that only target street kids. But, it will require that we influence those already experienced in the micro-credit/micro-finance sector to embrace this target population as viable credit recipients.

• It will require that we draw on the many lessons learned and the diversity of credit and entrepreneurship models that have been successful with women.

• It will require that we set realistic goals, standards and benchmarks. Street kids are truly the poorest of the poor and in many cases there are no adult figures in their lives and no financial support. It is important that we do not set up youth or ourselves for failure. We need to think of youth work as a blended model of enterprise creation and capacity building and not insist on perfect economic efficiency in the beginning years of programming initiatives. We need “patient” capital.

• We need to think out of the box about where youth are found. For example, we need to think of refugee camps as unique urban environments that for many will be the street-scape where youth move from childhood to adulthood. We need to ensure that programming for youth takes place in all these settings, with a presumption of as a physical and metaphorical place that is a permanent and formative part of their adolescence.

We believe we are on the threshold of significant learning. There are few projects in place but there are small, creative pilots being initiated under the radar screen. We believe there is great upside potential in economic programming for street kids that is more significant than the risks which will be there anyway. To do nothing because we are risk adverse in our programming and too quick to rely on stereotypes of adolescence puts this population quickly approaching adulthood, at further risk, and guarantees us a new and larger generation of families that will be headed by street kids.

Street Kids International

February, 2003