Girl-Child Streetism and Possible Interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Streetism is a growing problem worldwide and Africa is one of the continents with the highest population of street children. United Nations International Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF) refers to street children as children whom the street, more than their family, becomes their real home. The recent statistics released by UNICEF revealed that States in the North-east and North-west regions of Nigeria have female primary net attendance rates of 47.7 per cent and 47.3 per cent, which shows that more than half of the girls in those parts of the country are not in school. This paper examined streetism from the gender perspective, to draw the attention of the government, civil societies, and other stakeholders towards responding to the menace of street girls. This study was carried out by conducting document analysis and careful study of various secondary data sources obtained online. Google scholar, Scopus, and African Journals Online (AJOL) were used to retrieve journal articles, news items and other electronic materials written on the complexities of streetism as it affects girl children in Sub-Saharan Africa. High vulnerability to violence, rape, sexually transmitted diseases, and teenage pregnancy are the major problems found in the literature to be of peculiarity to street girls. Special programmes such as street education and literacy, and vocational skills acquisition programmes for street children were suggested as possible interventions to respond to the menace of streetism in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).