Street Children and Street Life in Urban Tanzania: The Culture of Surviving and its Implications for Children’s Health

During the past ten years, Tanzanian cities have undergone rapid changes that have transformed the urban environment as well as the lives of millions of people who live in this setting. The impact of these changes is affecting almost everybody, particularly the urban poor. One of the growing social problems associated with these changes is the tremendous increase in unsupervised children either living alone or working on urban streets. The number of urban street children, watoto wa mitaani, has increased rapidly during the last decade in Tanzania. This problem is especially acute in big cities like DarEs-Salaam, Arusha, Morogoro, Moshi, Tanga, Mbeya and Mwanza where the rates of urban population growth have been exploding amidst an intensifying and severe social and economic crisis. The rapid population growth has been associated with an increase in the number of children living alone on urban streets or spending most of their day on the streets in the quest for survival. The majority of these children have for various reasons either abandoned or have been abandoned by their families and have migrated to urban areas in order to earn a living. Their rapid increase in number at a time when Tanzania is experiencing great financial constraints raises concerns and calls for immediate attention. Currently, urban street children are seen as a problem which further compounds the nature of the urban crisis. Politicians, policy-makers and urban planners seem to be helpless in their efforts to either resolve the problem or to assist street children and have so far failed to prescribe plausible solutions which are realistic, down-to-earth and concrete. In fact, the official government attitude towards street children has been very negative. Street children are considered to be hooligans, vagabonds and prone to commit crimes. As a result of this, they have been a target of harassment by law enforcement organizations; there are many cases of street children being beaten by police, detained and sometimes repatriated to their rural homes. Nevertheless, these draconian measures have not provided long-term solutions to this social problem. The number of urban street children has continued to escalate every year. Why is this so? One reason for the failure of the government to provide viable solutions to this problem stems from the fact that the government is ignorant about urban street children in Tanzania. It has made no attempt to understand who these children are