PSYCHOSOCIAL AND HEALTH CONDITIONS OF STREET TEENAGERS: THE CASE OF YEKA SUB CITY, ADDIS ABABA

Abstract

There are large numbers of children living or spending most of their days on the street. Several organizations have been trying to help these children, but their approaches are ineffective as a result, many children are increasingly joining the street life. Children living on the street face numerous problems. They are ignored, abused and their needs such as food, clothes, and good- living environment are neglected by those who are supposed to look after them. To recognize and describe the existing conditions of this community groups, the study assessed the psychosocial and health conditions of street teenagers in Yeka Sub-city, Addis Ababa. To achieve the objective of this study, a descriptive research design with a concurrent mixed approach was employed. A convenience sampling technique was used to select 115 target respondents, who participated in both the survey questionnaire and indepth interviews. Among 115, 110 and 5 were participated in the survey questionnaire and in-depth interview, respectively. The quantitative data analyzed using descriptive statistics like frequencies, and percentages whereas qualitative data analyzed using thematic analysis. The study confirmed that street children face numerous problems which include psychological, health, social and economic problems. The finding of the study indicated that participants joined street life because of the situations such as family conflict, inducement, death of parents and search for opportunities. The participants of the study explained that they are encountering different problems in their street life. These include social abuse, health problems, drug use, and sexual abuse, lack of access to food, clothes, and shelter. The study finding also indicated that street children use different coping strategies such as flight, acceptance of abuse, engagement in remunerable labor activity, begging, scavenging and living in a group. Therefore, this study can serve as baseline information to further conduct another intensive research on other challenges of the street children in Yeka Sub-city, Addis Ababa. Finally, this finding recommends that, there is a need for conduction of more academic and related researches to determine the prevalence and other dimensions of problems that street children are facing difficult challenges in Yeka Sub-city, Addis Ababa which were not uncovered by this research study, and Government and NGOs should design a Project regarding street citizens so as their intervention plan should include activities designed to help the families of those reunited street children gain access to credit service in order to attain economic independence to help them take over the responsibility for the education of their children after the termination of rehabilitation.