The New Idea

Seham’s approach to working with street children reaches beyond the provision of services to this sidelined population, estimated to be as many as 1 million. She seeks to bring the children back into society rather than develop a parallel track. By working with the child’s community and, when possible, with their family, Seham and her team focus on healing through inclusion in the community. She assists communities to embrace the welfare of street children as a collective responsibility and begin to understand the circumstances—violence, domestic abuse, poverty—that conspire to cause children to initially leave home. Seham’s organization, Tofulty Foundation, helps street children directly by arranging medical care, psychiatric support, and training that encourages them to gain confidence, place trust themselves, and the world around them. The peer-to-peer counseling she arranges gives a sense of belonging and hope.

The Problem

Even though street children are a visible part of urban life in Egypt, there are no reliable figures that outline the scope of the problem. Unofficial studies put the number of children living on Egypt’s streets at between 200,000 and 1 million, with Cairo and Alexandria among the largest. Many more children do return to a home in the evening, but they work and live on the streets during the day and are subject to many of the same abuses. Surviving on the street often means begging and exploitation by adults. A 2000 survey revealed that 86 percent of street children identified violence as a major problem, and half said that they had been exposed in some manner to sexual abuse. To numb themselves to the harsh reality of their lives, many sniff glue and other toxic substances, causing them to be more lost, confused, and hopeless. Without fundamental changes in the family, going home is rarely an option. Consequentially, many children are arrested and spend time in jail. Police tend to treat street children as a social threat. Negative perceptions about street children further complicate their predicament and work against their reintegration into society. If the child is female, the perception is often that she is a sex worker, and if the child is male; a criminal beyond help. A shift in perception is necessary because the Egyptian public generally perceives street children as criminals and delinquents, rather than connects with, and works to correct the social ills that cause children to leave home. Various community members, from tea shop owners to police, are prepared and positioned to lead and oversee long-term solutions to keep these children safe and healthy and eventually off the streets. Since the 1990s, the problem has attracted attention from United Nation agencies and from some citizen organizations that offer shelter and social and medical services. However, no existing efforts focus on the child in the context of the child’s family and community and aim at lessening the numbers of children who end up on the street.

The Strategy

Starting in Helwan, an area south of Cairo, Seham and her team provide services directly to street children and their families, prepare the community to change its behavior towards this vulnerable group and work with citizen organizations and legal teams to lobby for favorable changes in policy pertaining to street children. So far, 11,000 children have benefited from the services and in some cases, partnerships with the Ministry of Health have been arranged to extend medical benefits to children who do not have birth certificates. Seham sees that helping parents is absolutely critical to securing a better future for children in Egypt. Sometimes there is hope of a child returning home if there are changes in the family situation. She and her team divide parents into two groups so they may wisely deploy resources and care. The first are those parents who are desperately poor and are not positioned to offer a stable home life. For these, Seham works with citizen organizations to offer access to credit and help to match parents with available jobs. She may arrange tailored services, such as family counseling, as needed. The second group comprises parents who have been abusive to their children—although there is less of a chance of recovery and reintegration of the child into the family—some services are available. A systematic referral system ensures appropriate allocation of resources, and facilitates an effective response from civil society. To encourage the community to feel ownership of the solution, Seham has identified four groups whose participation is essential: police, citizen organizations, natural leaders within the community, and the larger community. She has established a social counseling office at Azbakya police station, the central police station in Helwan that receives street children and holds them in custody. The Tofulty office at Azbakya police station takes in street children, determines what kind of services might benefit them, and arranges the services. Seham works with other police forces as well, and through this outreach helps to overcome the notion that street children are criminals by nature. Tofulty brings the broader community into the solution through participatory gatherings that include testimonials and stories of children who live on the streets. This up-close and direct contact generates empathy and resources, including money, volunteer time, and commitments to employ street children. Seham approaches the community leaders as two groups. The traditional leaders include sheiks, priests, teachers, and heads of big families. The non-traditional leaders are the owners of small tea and coffee shops where street children gather. She has asked the second group to inform Tofulty of new street children, link to children’s families, and generally monitor the children. Seham is pursuing several strategies to change the situation of street children across the country. She is consolidating her methodology and best practices so that she can share these. To minimize the costs of expansion, she hopes to mobilize volunteer leaders in Helwan to recruit and orient leaders in neighboring areas, a staffing strategy that she hopes to continue in ever-widening circles out from Helwan. She also plans to use existing spaces owned by citizen organizations and tea and coffee shops rather than secure costly independent space for Tofulty. As she gets at the root causes and provides tangible, community-led solutions to getting children off the streets, Seham is also changing the perception of street children so that they view themselves and are viewed by others as young people surviving difficult childhood circumstances, rather than as criminals. She is working with other citizen organizations to ensure that laws and public rhetoric change to support positive integration.

The Person

Seham is the youngest of five children with supportive parents. Her father owned a kahwa baladi (traditional café) and her mother kept the house. Forced to drop out of school in grade six, her mother passed along her dream of education to her daughters and Seham was an excellent student. She wrote for her school newspaper, sang in the school choir, played the guitar, and taught herself English. Following high school, she studied business administration at Cairo University, graduating in 1987. She began work with several international citizen organizations, including Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders). Over many years, she learned what services were provided to street children, what elements of existing programs worked well, and where there are gaps. While Seham found models that addressed part of the problem, there lacked a comprehensive approach focused on reintegration. In 1998 she founded Tofulty Foundation to carry her work forward.