Coping Strategies of Street Children in Nigeria (Report‪)‬

The past few decades have seen the proliferation of street children in Nigeria. This is evident in the number of children seen on the street scavenging, begging, hawking and soliciting. Oloko (1999) expressed that the phenomenon of street children in the strict sense of the term has been on the increase in most major urban areas. The increasing magnitude of the problem can be gauged from Oloko's (ibid) findings that in 1986, children who lived and slept on the streets were a rarity in Lagos, but in the 1990s, there were an estimated 8,000 of them and in 1999, they were found in over 100 locations in Lagos. Ahiante (2004) also expressed that street children are all over the markets, bus stops, car parks, garages, street corners, under the bridges and other public places across Nigeria's major cities. Some research efforts over the years have been directed towards exploring the problem of street children and the plausibility of ameliorating as well as rehabilitating the victims (Oloko 1999, Scanlon, Nobre Lamarao,1993; Vasino 1990; UNICEF 2001). Also, governments in different countries have tried and are still trying to rehabilitate street children. However, a high proportion of such efforts or measures are punitive in nature, that is, they focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation (Bourdillon 2001, Gigenback 1994 and Human Right Watch 2004). Therefore, the problem of street children seems unabated and is becoming a permanent feature especially in many developing societies across the globe. As a result, there is a global shift in focus from emphasis on the eradication of street children, to emphasis on meeting their immediate needs there on the streets.