Emergence of a New Community: Incidences, and Experiences of Children Living in the Streets of Harare-Zimbabwe

The occurrence of children living on the streets is assuming alarming proportions in Zimbabwe. The phenomenon is notably becoming a vicious cycle, children born and raised on the streets, eventually raise their own kids in the streets. The hallmark of this paper is to investigate issues surrounding children living on the streets, to examine their life experience and the challenges they face. This paper used qualitative research anchored on a phenomenological research paradigm. A phenomenological research strategy was used due to its usefulness in studying experiences from the point of view of people directly involved in the phenomenon. The population of the study was made up of street children aged between 12 and 19 living in the Harare CBD and down town area. Purposive and snowball sampling were used to come up with a sample of 20 street children who took part in individual semi-structured interviews. The research data was analysed using thematic analysis. The research findings indicated that street children are faced with a lot of challenges and negative experiences, including lack of access to food cleaning facilities, healthcare, risks associated with physical and sexual violence, as well as drug and substance abuse. These were found to be very detrimental to the physical and mental health of these children and in turn their prospects of growing up into healthy, responsible and economically active adults. The study thus recommended that, the welfare of this group of people is a policy issue and a multi-sectoral approach is needed to ameliorate all the challenges faced by this group of people.