Schooling and Social Problems

I found that the parents and their children had a huge desire to be seen as respectable Kenyans. They wanted to do the state examination and receive a certificate of primary education. The children attended school regularly and compared very favourably with the normal city children. However, I soon came across some enormous problems. There were thousands of children on the street and the longer they stayed out of school and on the streets, the more costly it became to educate them. Hard-core street children could only be taught by expert teachers in small groups, whereas slum children who had not had street experience could be taught in groups of forty. Although I continued to admit older street children to the school, I tried to admit most of the children before they went to the streets and in the meantime gradually set up back-up services to help with the well-being of all the children.