By Madeeha Ansari

AS part of a global research project on forced migration, I was able to listen closely to the stories of children who had perhaps one, perhaps two parents of Afghan origin, and whose only memories were of life in Pakistan. The most powerful, common motif reverberating through their experiences was: ‘I was born here’.

In September 2023, an announcement was made giving undocumented families and individuals of Afghan origin a deadline of Nov 1 to exit the country. This impacts an estimated 1.7 million people, and includes communities that have experienced protracted displacement since the 1980s. For many, a second and often a third generation of children has grown up in Pakistan. However, without pathways to citizenship, their position has remained insecure — even for registered refugees, Proof of Registration (PoR) or Afghan Citizen cards have been subject to renewal after a certain time period.

What, then, is identity? If identity is a document, then it could be a valuable key opening doors to education, livelihoods, the dream of a future different from that of an uprooted generation. The PoR or Afghan Citizen card fit into some doors, enabling bright-eyed young people to enter formal schools and build, brick by brick, those imagined futures. But identity as a document can be a vanishing key, as many now fear deportation in the second phase of the plan as currently shared.

The fear of repatriation was one reason why some of the most vulnerable communities — often in informal, urban contexts — chose to remain invisible, even if that meant giving up even the most basic rights. There was nothing promised to them, yet they fought to stay — moving multiple times, even from the rubble of bulldozed settlements. Perhaps, then, identity is more than a piece of paper, and has something to do with homes built and rebuilt, relationships forged, children born and raised.

They were born here. When embracing friends, saying goodbye, tearing up at the border while facing uncertainty ahead, a voice somewhere whispers: they belong here.

In a parallel reality, children born in Pakistan would have had access to the same kind of birthright citizenship, according to the 1951 Citizenship Act, as those who came as refugees to the country in 1947. They would be able to open bank accounts, own property, enrol in schools with the confidence that comes from a secure national identity. In this alternative vision, they would have the responsibilities that come with citizenship rights, part of a social contract and contributing to a shared and harmonious future.

But our reality is less than utopian, with a crippling economic crisis and worsening security conditions driving both public and policy reactions. One question is whether the sudden exodus of Afghan communities will truly impact, for the better, the fuel prices having a paralytic effect on families in Pakistan — or the rising threat of violence from angered Taliban neighbours.

For the children and families now being sent to holding centres or across the border, the signs are pointing to a humanitarian and “human rights catastrophe”, according to the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. It will be the latest wave of disruption and displacement, this time to a barely post-war pariah country with little international support, and few or no remaining personal networks to moor them. The likely scenario will be the setting up of yet more camps during a harsh winter, with little time to prepare for their arrival and basic survival in terms of food and shelter, let alone livelihoods and education. The journey itself is fraught with physical protection risks for women and children, who are ever the most vulnerable in a crisis. Once there, unless there are provisions for protection, sanitation and hygiene in camp conditions, there will once more not only be risks in terms of disease but also physical and sexual violence.

They were refugees here. And if they go ‘back’ to Afghanistan in this way, they will be refugees there. In the medium term, there are big question marks surrounding livelihoods and education, and whether Afghanistan has the capacity to absorb such a large number of people. For children, sudden and involuntary migration can have a deeply traumatic impact for which there are unlikely to be psychosocial support mechanisms, or the provision of safe and child-friendly spaces that can provide stability. In fact, there is a high likelihood of families relying on negative coping strategies such as early marriage and child labour to survive. Girls are expressing terror at the prospect of losing their chance to go to school, in the only country where female education is banned.

As of Nov 5, an estimated 128,000 people have left via Torkham. While this is a fraction of the intended numbers, there are reports of minors being separated from caregivers, and of Pakistani Pakhtun minors being mistakenly sent across the border. If anything, all this indicates that an undertaking of this magnitude needs more time, careful planning and communication across stakeholders — including governments, UN agencies, civil society and individuals at risk — to ensure that any return is truly what we as a country have for decades promised it will be: voluntary, safe and dignified.

Identity is a tangled mesh of past and present. For third-generation children, growing up in a ‘host’ country means their identities are informed by transmitted memories and culture — but also very much by their lives and experiences in the only home they have known. We owe it to them to consider them, their protection and rights in any next steps, so they can say with pride that they were born in Pakistan.

Featured Photo by Kevin Kremer

The post Born in Pakistan appeared first on Cities for Children.

On 23 June 2021, Cities for Children facilitated a workshop for civil society organizations in Pakistan entitled “Change Our Story” – Understanding and Implementing UN General Comment No. 21 on Children in Street Situations. 

This was the second in a series of three events to forge a path forward for street-connected children in Pakistan, with support from the Consortium of Street Children. The aims of this session were to promote participants’ understanding of the UNGC 21 as an authoritative international instrument; to discuss real-world challenges faced by organizations in education and protection; and explore how to embed the rights-based approach of the UNGC in practice.

Participants included representatives from a number of organizations who have been working on issues related street children and child protection in Pakistan, including  Dost Foundation, Sahil, Search for Justice, Door of Awareness, National Commission on the Rights of the Child and SPARC. 

The session began with a conversation on who we meant by “children in street situations” or “street-connected children,”  and an exploration of some of the salient features of UNGC 21. The UNGC 21 takes a non-discriminatory, rights based approach towards street-connected children, with an emphasis on children’s participation in matters concerning them. It lays out three kinds of approaches: the welfare approach, taking the lens of rescuing children as victims; the repressive approach, which includes criminalization for survival activities; and the rights-based approach, which considers the child as a rights-holder and the state as the duty-bearer.

UNGC 21 holds guidance for prevention (pre-empting the challenges of poverty and domestic violence) as well as the response that governments can adopt to ensure the rights of street children. It lays out a roadmap for developing comprehensive national strategies related to such children. These include a legislative and policy review to eliminate provisions that discriminate against street children, and the practices that place them at risk including forced eviction. Data collection to gauge the scale of the challenge (while avoiding stigmatising street children or placing them at greater risk) is another national level recommendation, as is the creation of comprehensive child protection systems. Also,  importantly, the General Comment reminds policy makers and civil society organisations to acknowledge the complexity of the issue and to prioritise individual children’s best interests in all situations. As adults, it is easy for policy makers and civil society members to assume that they know what is best for a child. The UNGC 21 emphasizes that children must be given a say in determining their future.

Urgent challenges 

After an initial description of UNGC 21, the workshop participants were asked to share their experiences and identify urgent challenges faced by street children in Pakistan. Five major themes emerged during this brainstorming session: 

• Violence of different kinds including physical, sexual and psychological
• Access to education, impeded by factors like lack of documentation
• Discriminatory laws and policies that criminalise children and families
• Lack of data on the nature and scale of the challenge
• Absence of a national strategy for street children. 

Sexual violence, corporal punishment in schools and domestic settings were identified as major challenges for street-connected children in the country. Azaz from Dost Welfare Foundation emphasized that breaking the cycle of physical, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse for street-connected children was extremely important as survivors could turn to violence if they did not receive the help and support they need.

Identity documents like B-form and birth certificates were also described as one of the biggest impediments to street children’s access to education. Participants pointed out that since many children were from displaced communities and had been on the move for years, they did not have the required documentation to access public schooling. Sabeen from SPARC emphasized that a national strategy was needed to address the challenges faced by street connected children, to ensure that national and provincial institutions were working towards the same end goals. 

Iqbal Detho from NCRC shared that the present criminalization of street children, their vagrancy and presence in public spaces could be traced back to colonial times. Colonial definitions of vagrancy were designed to prevent people from gathering and protesting, something that could not be extended to street children in the present day and rendered the current legislation problematic. A point of discussion in the group was shared that many organisations were using the pretext of rehabilitation to institutionalize street children, which was against the spirit of UNGC 21 and needed to be rectified. According to the UNGC21, “Deprivation of liberty is never a form of protection”.

Recommendations for action

After a brief introduction to the case study of Uruguay’s participatory national strategy on street-connected children, the discussion moved towards potential solutions for Pakistan. 

Some major takeaways highlighted during the discussion were:

• An urgent need for a national action plan to make progress on street children’s issues, possibly within a larger framework of child protection. Ifitkhar Mubarik from SJFP stressed that the government needed to make its commitment to street children clear before passing any national or provincial legislation to tackle the issue.

• Comprehensive legislative and policy review in line with the rights-based approach and UNGC 21. Iqbal Detho called for the removal of discriminatory laws in particular. 

• A  life skills-based educational approach including vocational opportunities for street children, for learning to be valued. Manizeh Bano from Sahil and Ghazi Taimoor from Doors of Awareness both had insights to share around this, as there is a need to frame education as something that will add practical value to the lives of children who often need to choose between earning or going to school.

• Simplifying the process for obtaining identity documents, especially for children with refugee or displaced community backgrounds. Sajida from SPARC shared that the difficult process of retrospectively obtaining B-form and birth certificates compounded problems by hindering their access to healthcare, public schooling and jobs.

• Strengthening of child protection legislation and systems. Children face multiple risks of violence with little recourse, and working to prevent them from taking to the streets as well as to provide real support in working with families to overcome the challenges of urban poverty will take careful thinking as well as investment. According to the UNGC, interventions moving children into alternative care without consultation don’t work – they won’t stay – so sustainable solutions must be found. There is need to train officials as well as law enforcement agencies and put in place measures to reduce risks of harassment and have transparent systems set up to protect their rights.

Overall, the workshop provided civil society organisations with a chance to share their expertise with each other and gave them an opportunity to use the UNGC 21 framework to discuss the challenges faced by street-connected children. It will be followed by an in-person action-planning session involving a broader swathe of policymakers and civil society representatives, being planned for August 2021.

The post Change our Story: Understanding and Implementing UNGC 21 appeared first on Cities for Children.

By Madeeha Ansari, Founder

A COUPLE of years ago, I visited a drop-in centre for street children in Peshawar as part of a mapping exercise. The children there were generally ‘of the street’, i.e. they did not return to their families or homes. The programme manager explained how many of them would travel between Islamabad and Peshawar, and at the time, they were particularly excited to be part of the PTI dharna.

Such political engagement was not too surprising. In some ways, it resembled the participation of street-connected children in the Arab Spring. In Egypt, they were termed the ‘revolution’s smallest soldiers’, as they would show up at the front lines, braving the violence to feel like they were part of something bigger. The public movement — democratised by the streets — held the promise of food, camaraderie and a sense of belonging.

It was a moment to celebrate, then, when Prime Minister Imran Khan gave some of his youngest supporters the dignity of recognition in his inaugural address. “Street children are our children,” he said, extending the promise of an invitation to children who otherwise stand on the margins.

For those interested in human rights and development, it seemed like the time had finally come for the national conversation to shift to human security by addressing the vulnerabilities of the individual in order to achieve longer-term peace and prosperity, and sparked something like hope.

However, it was also a moment to pause. Advocacy agendas can take on new life in the hands of a powerful champion, which would not otherwise be possible in spite of the diligent efforts of child rights workers over decades. There is an opportunity in the sudden sparking of national interest, as well as a risk. ‘Street children’ cannot be a buzzword.

In order to ensure that things are done well, it’s important to understand the nature of the challenges. According to the Wilson Centre, Pakistan is urbanising at the fastest rate in South Asia. Already it appears that about half the urban population lives in katchi abadis, or informal slum settlements. These include Afghan refugee communities, those who have been internally displaced by disaster or conflict within the country over the past few years, as well as economic migrants coming in from rural areas. A most difficult aspect of working with communities that are undocumented and often seen as ‘mobile’ or ‘transient’, is that their existence in cities may be in conflict with the laws of municipal authorities.

‘Street children’ itself is an umbrella term, encompassing a wide range of young people who may or may not have links with these informal urban communities. In the child rights world, the term increasingly used is ‘street-connected’, meaning children who depend on the streets for survival — whether they live on the streets, work on the streets, have support networks on the streets, or have some combination of the three. Children exposed to the streets experience a range of vulnerabilities that are different from what they would experience in rural areas eg the risks of abuse, neglect and exploitation by criminal or militant groups. Economic pressures mean they must choose between work and school.

Pakistan is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the underlying principles are non-discrimination and the best interests of the child. Non-discrimination means that no one gets left behind — even those who live in the sprawling settlements that exist as an inconvenient truth. The best-interest consideration means that solutions need to be tailored by listening to children whose stories and experience are not uniform.

If the plan is to have more and better protection facilities for street-connected children, that will be welcome. However, the task is far more complicated than setting up brick-and-mortar structures. While physical protection matters greatly, particularly for those who are vulnerable to both physical and sexual abuse on the streets, what happens inside those walls is of critical importance. The quality of services can really determine the trajectories of the young people who enter, and how they will interact with the world when they leave. It is also important to consider where the children will go from there, and whether their families are in a position to support their return.

The issue of street-connected children cannot be viewed in isolation; there are drivers and stressors that bring them where they are. The ‘urbanisation’ of poverty is a dilemma that much of the world is struggling with, and solutions require some bold and dynamic thinking. Perhaps the present government, with its reform-oriented agenda, can be the one to take it on.

Time will tell what the tangible outcome of the prime minister’s promise will be. For now, the first significant step has been taken: children who were invisible have finally been seen.

The post Promise for streetchildren appeared first on Cities for Children.

As part of our “Right to Play” strand of work, on 21st April 2018 we supported a special Sports Day event for over 400 children and parents from the urban slums of Islamabad.  These are communities served by our partner, the Pehli Kiran School System, a network of open-air, non-formal schools in settlements across the city. They cater to nearly 1800 refugee or migrant children who often have to choose between work and education, and face a range of risks on the streets.

It was a day filled with colour and joy, as each of the eight schools chose a different colour to represent themselves. Hajra Khan, captain of the national women’s football team, was present as Chief Guest and helped distribute prizes. She represented a positive female role model for the boys and girls who participated with equal enthusiasm. Competition was tough, but the red team – Pehli Kiran School No. 8 – took away the trophy for the overall tournament.

The Sports Day was not only an opportunity for the children to showcase their talents and to proudly represent their schools but was also a chance to develop qualities like discipline and sportsman’s spirit. In addition, for the schools, it was a way of increasing engagement with the communities: both mothers and fathers were invited to participate in the games, and to help with organising the distribution of refreshments as well as the “clean-up” zone.

One of the games for the mothers was “Getting Ready for School,” which involved a simulated race against time to get their children ready for the day. This worked towards one overall aim of the event, which was to increase motivation for communities to continue sending their children to school.

Looking around at the happy faces, music and festivity, one of the participating mothers couldn’t hold back a smile.

“My heart is bursting with happiness at this sight,” she said.

We believe that “happy memories build resilience” for young people who otherwise face hardships that force them to make adult decisions far too early. Ultimately, the Sports Day was one in which community volunteers, students, teachers and parents were all brought together for a rare and memorable shared experience.

NB: We would like to particularly acknowledge the support of volunteers from Right to Play Pakistan, who gave generously of their time and created the video above.

The post Colour and Joy – PKSS Annual Sports Day 2018 appeared first on Cities for Children.

Looking back, 2017 marked a milestone in the world of child rights. The United Nations General Comment No. 21 on Children in Street Situations was published in June marking an important step towards protecting street-connected children. While children are recognised as rights holders under the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), there had previously been no explicit mention of street-connected children.

The development of the General Comment itself involved extensive consultation sessions with over 1,000 former and current street-connected children in 49 countries, to include their views. The participatory process is exemplary, as it recognises that children are the experts on their own lives and that they should have a voice in matters and decisions that concern them.

Since street children are often mobile, they have stayed relatively under the radar in the development and humanitarian spheres. It has been difficult to find sources on exactly how many street-connected children there are globally and consequently assess the dangers they face. During the consultation sessions, several interesting and important things were brought to light by the children that hopefully will be changed with the publication of the General Comment.

Governments often see street-connected children as a nuisance and believe them to be criminals. Not only did the children report that violence from the police is a common occurrence for many of them, they also said that oftentimes they do not receive any legal or protective help from the authorities. The peer relationships amongst street-connected children are thus very important – and even these are sometimes threatened by authorities.

Street-connected children were also concerned about the lack of access they have to basic necessities, such as food, medical care, shelter, clothes and education. It is very usual for shelters to be in such bad conditions that children prefer to stay on the street; medical care and education often requires documentation that the children struggle to obtain; and food and clothes are expensive, making children resort to begging or sometimes even unlawful activities, in order to sustain themselves. We at Cities for Children believe that street-connected children deserve to have their basic needs met, whilst also gently be supported to make the best of their lives, for example by giving them access to education.

Moving forward, we believe that governments, communities, NGOs and any actors involved with protecting and supporting street-connected children need to find a balance between trying to prevent children ending up on the street, providing those that do with services they need, whilst also recognising the realities these children face that prompt them to choose the streets. The fact that the General Comment demands States to take a child rights approach to strategies and initiatives for children in street situations, is a leap forward for young people whose voices were previously unheard.

The post Giving street children a voice appeared first on Cities for Children.

On 9^th November 2017, the Cities for Children team attended the Consortium for Street Children (CSC) Annual Research Conference, I BEND BUT I DON’T BREAK: Exploring Street-Connected Children’s Resilience.

The day involved panel discussions and presentations of academic research, as well as hands-on workshops where practitioners shared their experiences of working with children in street situations across the world. One thing that really stood out to me in the discussions was the message of hope carried by children, in spite of the odds against them on the streets.

Defining resilience

To me, resilience means the capacity to bounce back from adversity – although as it turns out, the term is widely contested, with some people only including positive coping mechanisms and others also including negative ones. Some experts argue that resilience comes from within the child, while others look at factors such as family and the wider community.

My colleague, Alizeh Hameed, came away with the following take on definitions:

The participants and attendees of the conference repeatedly highlighted the importance of defining ‘resilience’ before donors decide to define it for those on the frontlines…Activists, academics and practitioners need to own the term ‘resilience’ before it is globally defined as something different, rendering current and ongoing work irrelevant and putting some of the children in need of support outside of the “project scope.”

Each session yielded new insights on what the term could mean, but the theme of hope as resilience seemed to run through each one.

Peer support

During the first panel on “Understanding and Experiences of Resilience on the Streets,” Alfred Ochaya from SALVE International talked about his work in Uganda. One of the most powerful pieces of advice that children gave each other in one of his group sessions was:

“Don’t lose hope. No bad condition is permanent.”

Alfred told us that children are aware of the difficulties in their situations, but also actively try finding ways of getting out of them: they go to school, play with other children, and make arrangements with market traders who help them save money.

In an afternoon workshop, academics Dr Andrew Stevenson and Dr Jeremy Oldfield showed a documentary about their research project in Guatemala City. For this they talked to children living and/or working in La Terminal, a massive marketplace and transport hub. The children had formed close relationships with others living in La Terminal and were working together to try make their lives better.

“Dawn after dusk”

The last panel was a powerful discussion focused on sexual violence in the context of the street. Survivors spoke about “Dawn after dusk”, and the resurgence of hope after enduring the horror of sexual violence. Helen Veitch from Children Unite spoke about hope as a coping mechanism for child domestic workers in Nepal who had been sexually abused. They set goals they could aspire to, which made it possible for them to endure hardship. Again, I was astounded by the strength of the young people, having the resilience to cope with difficult situations while exposed to the risks of urban poverty.

“Happy memories build resilience”

It is so easy for adults to think that children cannot do a lot, while actually they have immense individual potential, and inspiring capacity to retain positive outlooks. The research conference really confirmed for me that Cities for Children can play a hugely important role for children facing challenges on the streets, by offering them the opportunity to play and feel safe.

As Madeeha, our founder, says, “Happy memories build resilience.” By giving them the tools to keep coping and hoping, we can help children build the brighter future of which they dream.

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