My work as Children at Risk Advisor with UMN is to support our partner organisations – some very small community groups and some big national NGOs – who share our passion and concern about children at risk in Nepal.
One of our partners is a Christian network, which brings together churches, child homes and other groups who are caring for, and giving hope to, children in particularly difficult circumstances.
It aims to work with ‘invisible children’ – kids who are simply often not seen, or ignored by society. These include the many street children in urban areas of Nepal (especially Kathmandu), children at risk of being trafficked, and children who live in extreme poverty.
Recent studies have shown that many hundreds of children come to Kathmandu each year, sometimes sent by their families to earn money, which they do by working in tea shops, as bus conductors, as domestic labourers for wealthy families or as sex workers.
Collaboration
In February, I co-facilitated a five-day workshop with the aim of helping participants form realistic and appropriate policies so that children could develop physically, emotionally, socially and spiritually.
On the fourth day, the local police superintendent was invited to speak about how organisations could work with the police.
He spoke honestly about the growing problem of street children in Kathmandu and asked for help in dealing with them in a more ‘child sensitive’ way.
The following day, one of the participants who runs a children at risk network, received a call from the superintendent's office asking for help with two eight year-old boys who had been arrested for stealing noodles.
He went straight from the workshop to the police station where he found the boys, not in the cells, but in the superintendent's office. The boys were then taken to a special home where they will receive food and shelter while their families were being contacted to see if it is OK for them to return home.
This kind of collaboration hadn't happened before. We were delighted that the police were prepared to ask for help and that it was a small Christian NGO that they turned to.
Credit: Saipal
Though the United Nations has estimated the population of street children worldwide at 150 million, nobody knows their exact number in Nepal – street children are not easy to count because they move around a lot, within and between cities like Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur.
(Global Politician, 2005)