Gender, Culture and Children Services Cabinet Secretary, Hanna Cheptumo, says her Ministry plans to start reintegrating street families back into society.
She noted that the State Department for Children Services has already set-up a special Committee within the Street Families Rehabilitation Trust Fund, which will oversee the exercise across all 47 counties.
According to Ms. Cheptumo, besides re-uniting the people living on the streets with their families, there are also plans to enroll the children among them in schools as well as equip the adults with technical and vocational skills, to help them become self-sufficient and enable them settle into society.
“As part of care reforms, the Ministry will soon roll-out the street families’ re-integration program. This is where we will take all street children off the streets and where possible all of them will be re-united with their families because everybody deserves to be in a family,” she stated.
Ms. Cheptumo said that the exercise is targeting some 46, 639 street persons mapped during the last national street families census, conducted in 2018. Findings from the 2018 census showed that Nairobi with (15,337), Mombasa (7,529), Kisumu (2,746), Uasin Gishu (2,147) and Nakuru (2,005) had the highest concentration of people living in the streets.
The Census showed that out of the 46,000 street families’ population, 21,550 of them were youth aged between 19-34 years, followed by children below the age of 19 years whose total population stood at 15,752. The polls also showed the proportion of persons living on their own in the streets was higher at 36,057 compared to those that were living with their parents which stood at 10,582.
On the level of education, the Census titled, National Census of Street Families Report, showed that 76 per cent (31,976) of the people living in the streets had acquired some basic primary school level education while 13,566 of the street family population had some vocational skills.
The CS spoke in Nyeri during celebrations held to mark International Widows Day and the national Gender Based Violence sensitization forum.
This year, the Widows Day was marked under the theme Invisible Women, Invisible Problems, which sought to spotlight the unique challenges faced by widows across the world.
While addressing close to 2,000 widows who turned-up for the event, the CS lauded the County Government of Nyeri for coming-up with widow-centric programs, including setting-up a widow’s savings and co-operative society.
She at the same time challenged the 65,000 widows residing in the County to take advantage of the different programs presented by the county government and national government to better their lives.
“I would like to congratulate the Governor of Nyeri, Dr Mutahi Kahiga, for setting-up the Widows Sacco. This Sacco needs to work so that other counties can come here and benchmark. Also, I would like to encourage widows to register themselves in self-help groups because it is only way we will be able to reach you and give you the resources availed through the budget making process,” she stated.
Present during the event were Gender Principal Secretary, Anne Wang’ombe, Nyeri Deputy Governor, Warui Kinaniri, Nyeri County Commissioner Ronald Mwiwawi, Nyeri Town Member of Parliament, Duncan Maina, Women Representatives, Rahab Mukami (Nyeri) and Ann Muratha (Kiambu).
By Wangari Mwangi
