Early Encounter
The Challenge: It is estimated that approximately 100 million children live on the streets of our cities worldwide. Often addicted to a brutal life of gang crime and violence these children inevitably end up either populating our prisons or filling our cemeteries. The many projects that work with these young people often struggle to effectively rehabilitate and re-integrate them: it's not just a matter of taking the child out of the street, but also taking the street habits out of the child. The addiction to drugs, crime, and an unrestrained and destructive lifestyle often prove just too hard to overcome.
The Idea: Recent research in Bolivia discovered that children arrived on the city streets through certain urban nerve centres or gateways: the bus station, the town market, the main taxi stand, etc. It was also revealed that within approximately 20 minutes those new arrivals to the city were encountered by other street children, drug sellers, or brothel owners, and were quickly sucked into the downward spiral of street culture. Sadly it was only after this point that 99% of projects started working to extract and rehabilitate the child. So why didn't we encounter them first?
The Solution: The existing data on where children were entering the cities provided the guidance on where to focus preventative work. Local people with a knowledge of the culture and the area, such as taxi drivers, tourist guides, or shop owners, could then be used as ‘scouts’ and placed at key centres, such as bus or train stations, to be the primary contact for an arriving child. Once the child was intercepted and taken to a safe house, the long-term needs could be properly assessed and the child could be appropriately placed within the local Viva network to be given the best possible care.
19 community projects in Cochabamba, Bolivia, formed a network of response, and a team of four staff was hired to run the encounter centre. The scheme brings together a range of key people from existing local projects, churches, community groups, regional authorities, and governments to work together in a co-ordinated city-wide approach.
The Result: The Bolivian government actually had a programme to help street children in Cochabamba, which rescued approximately 100 children in five years. In the first six months of the Early Encounter programme 300 children were reached through its preventative measures. New cities are now being incorporated every year, aiming to encounter more than 27,000 children in the next five years across Bolivia, Peru, and Guatemala. Already the programme has been able to offer real hope for the future to many hundreds of children who would otherwise have been lost to the streets.
The Partnership: Here local projects and international organisations interact with positive, lasting, and transforming results. The resources and expertise of an international organisation, the local knowledge of projects, the contacts and alliances of Viva, and the network vehicle all came together to change children’s lives. Even with Toybox’s focus on street children, and the fresh realisation that they must be dealt with proactively, the initiative's success is due mainly to the power of projects and people being connected and working together.