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Jailed Kids Program
Why are children at risk?
Over 80% of the families living within the Mathare slums are headed by single mothers who have had little or no education. Consequently, they struggle in menial jobs in order to get money to feed their families.
Mathare families are often too poor to pay fees for all their children to go to school. Children therefore, unsupervised by a parent or parents who are at work, spend their days on the streets in search of food or income. Many are then arrested by the police and jailed while waiting processing at the Nairobi Juvenile Court. They are later taken to juvenile remand homes until their parents are able to collect them. This doesn’t always happen, as the mothers often don’t know their children are in jail.
What happens to the arrested children?
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday up to 100 children are collected from local jails and police stations, crammed into trucks and taken to the juvenile courts located beside the Kenya parliament buildings. Their ages range from 3 to16 years old. For many, their primary offence is being poor, abandoned or orphaned. Most are charged with vagrancy.
The kids are usually left without breakfast, do not get any lunch and sometimes return too late for dinner. They spend most of the day in the court building, crowded into two small cells with no lighting or ventilation. They also have nowhere to sit. There is only one toilet but it is reserved for staff. Tough adult criminals are often put in the same cells as the kids. Many of the kids have medical problems caused by rough treatment, poor food and contagious diseases in the jails.
The Jailed Kids Project
In 1997, MYSA started the jailed kids project as a community support programme with the overall objective of getting children released from remand homes or jail and reunited with their families.
Key objectives
- Feed arrested children
- Refurbish the Kabete remand home.
- Improve the sanitary facilities in the court and at the Kabete remand home.
- Collect useful data: their places of residence, cause of their arrest etc, so as to improve their chances of being released.
- Trace jailed kids’ families and reunite them, with follow-up to prevent kids returning to the courts.
- Initiate sports programmes at approved schools, beginning with Kabete remand home
- Provide rescued kids with an opportunity to go back to school.
- Install computers in the remand home and enable the kids to learn how to use them.
- Improve treatment and preventive actions against common contagious infections such as scabies, ringworms and other skin related diseases.
- Procure a project van to facilitate easy reunions and follow-ups of released kids.
Key achievements
Since November 1997 the jailed kids project has:
- Fed a total 31, 539 kids - an average of 457 arrested children per month (including annual Christmas day meals).
- Re-united over 1,235 children with their families within the Mathare slums and outskirts.
- Linked over 421 poor mothers from the Mathare community with the Jamii Bora Trust (micro-financing organisation) with the aim of starting small-scale businesses.
- Created a good working relationship with the Children’s Department, the police, the Mathare community, the jailed kids and other local authorities.
- Employed committed staff and established a network towards management by objectives.
- Repatriated 824 children back to their localities outside Nairobi.
- Initiated sporting activities at the remand home where 559 boys and 291 girls trained in football netball and volleyball. Apart from the fitness aspect it also counteracted the boredom in the home.
Future aims
- Prevent more kids from going in jail while helping those already jailed for long periods.
- Toilets and showers at the Kabete remand home are in a sorry state and a health hazard and should be renovated.
- At the moment we are able to provide basic first aid but some kids need more professional medical checkups and treatment including treatment for psychological disorders and trauma.
- It has been time consuming and very expensive to repatriate children back to their localities using public transport. With a vehicle, we will be able to greatly increase the number of kids we remove from the juvenile system and reunite with their families and will be easier to make follow-ups.
- Almost all of the kids who have been released and reunited with their families find it very difficult to go back to school. Although there is free primary education in Kenya their parents still have to buy uniforms and sometimes textbooks. This is a very big challenge to most of the parents. Some of the kids end up on the streets and in the cells again. To avoid this cycle a return to school formula has to be worked out. Providing the families with initial assistance to buy the uniforms can be one way to stop the kids filtering back into the streets.
- Kids in the Kabete remand home deserve a chance just like others to have access to computers. We can teach them how to use computers and at the same time, expand their education. Communicating with other kids outside the home would benefit those inside.
- The young kids locked in the cells do not have access to information about AIDS and drugs. In future, this will form part of the life skills teaching that the youth of Mathare want to impart to the juveniles.
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