This article explores the lived experiences of street-connected youth in African cities, highlighting the multiple socio-economic challenges they face alongside their resilience in navigating daily survival. Drawing on focus groups across three cities, it reconceptualizes resilience as a dynamic, context-driven process shaped by social, institutional, and environmental factors, with implications for policy and practice.

This study evaluates how NGOs in Geita, Tanzania support street children, finding that while basic needs like food, shelter, and healthcare are prioritized, education and psychosocial services are often overlooked. It highlights funding constraints and coordination gaps as key challenges, calling for standardized service packages and more sustainable, rights-based approaches to improve long-term outcomes.

This qualitative study explores the experiences of street children in Benin City, Nigeria, finding that family breakdown, poverty, abuse, and lack of parental care are key drivers of children leaving home. It shows that once on the streets, children adopt various survival strategies, including informal labor, begging, crime, and substance use, and calls for coordinated government and community action to strengthen families and support reintegration.

Using a qualitative approach, this study captures the voices of juveniles in correctional facilities, orphanages and street environments in Zambia. Findings reveal patterns of emotional distress, societal exclusion and systemic failures that contribute to cycles of vulnerability and marginalization.

This Working Paper outlines the complex ways in which displacement affects girls’ access to justice, and how these are often overlooked. It places special emphasis on the achievement of SDG16.2: 'put an end to abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and all forms of violence and torture against children', and SDG16.7: ‘ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels, ’ located in the context of the 70 Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women’s priority theme of ‘ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls. ’

This qualitative case study in Arua City, Uganda, explores how parenting practices contribute to the persistence of street children, drawing on interviews with 30 street-connected children as well as parents and community leaders. Findings show that poverty, neglect, abuse, weak supervision, and family breakdown—combined with push factors like hunger and domestic violence and pull factors such as peer networks and perceived economic opportunity—drive children to the streets, underscoring the need for strengthened family support, community protection systems, and parental economic empowerment.

This study explores why street children resist removal interventions and often return to the streets in Zambia, drawing on perspectives from children, caregivers, and guardians. It finds that factors such as poverty, family conflict, abuse, and inadequate conditions in care facilities drive both initial street involvement and reintegration failure, highlighting the need for more comprehensive and coordinated interventions.

This study examines whether institutional rehabilitation for street girls in Pakistan is genuinely transformative by assessing services at the Zamung Kor Model Institute through a gender- and child-centred lens. While findings show improvements in safety, emotional regulation, and educational engagement, persistent gaps in trauma-informed care, vocational pathways, and post-discharge support highlight the need to reconceptualize rehabilitation as a continuous, community-linked process.

This mixed-methods study, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from all 15 counties in Liberia, examines the drivers and scale of children living in street situations through interviews with children, parents, government, UN, and civil society actors.

Street children in Bangladesh face chronic food insecurity, unstable shelter, limited access to health and education, and pervasive violence and abuse, as revealed through qualitative interviews with twenty children in Khulna district. Based on the hierarchy of needs expressed by the children, the study identifies essential long-term protection interventions, including community shelter services, psychological counseling, and skill-development training, and underscores the urgent need to implement these measures to ensure their safety and well-being.