Kobulin Officials Call For Urgent Interactions With Parents Over The Street Children

30 August 2023, 7:45 pm

By Joshua Imalingat

Officials at Kobulin Youth Skills Training center in Napak district are calling for urgent interactions involving parents to understand why children in the district escape to live on the streets in urban areas.

Reports suggest that nearly 90 percent of the children living on the streets of Kampala and Nairobi in Kenya hail from Napak district.

Jimmy Olipa, the Supervisor for a youth skilling program at Koblin told Etoil A Karamoja news reporters who visited the facility a few days ago that there is need for a wider engagement with parents to understand the why their children end up on the streets to earn a living from begging from strangers.

Olipa explained that many children who are brought to the center to be rehabilitated and trained on livelihood skills usually find their way back to the street even after they have been reunited with their parents.

He adds that it is also important for the youth to be exposed to various life-skills so that they are able to find alternative means to fend for themselves.

According to Olipa, annually, the center receives and rehabilitates over 400 street children rescued from the streets by government, Kampala capital city authority officials and civil society organizations especially those dealing with children.

John Rober Ojang, the Officer in-charge of Child and Family Protection Unit in Napak district told Etoil A Karamoja in that the problem is cuts across all the nine districts of Karamoja.

He explained that they have formed security structures right from the district to the village level in an attempt to resolve the problem. He disclosed that they have so far arrested five people for trafficking children adding that two of them have since been convicted of the crime of child trafficking.

Ojang listed peer influence especially from the mothers, poor parenting, family breakups, early marriages, and poverty as some of the key causes for the rising number of children from Karamoja ending up on the streets in towns and cities.

John Paul Kodet, the LC5 Chairperson of Napak district told our reporters that government needs comprehensive solutions to the problem of street children and thus should take it as a national problem rather than a Karamoja problem.

Currently, Napak has a population of 168,000 people spread across the 14 lower local administrative units covering 4,978 square kilometers of land.