Problems Faced by Street Children Towards Accessing Education in Rawalpindi City

Abstract

Education is a human right and one of the key channels through which intergenerational poverty cycles can be broken, but in most developing states, it has been very inaccessible to children in the streets. This paper focuses on the socioeconomic and institutional constraints that affect the access to education of street-going children in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Information was gathered on 110 street-working children using a quantitative cross-sectional research design by the use of structured interviews. The relationships between parental education, schooling costs, parental encouragement, and children education involvement were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the chi-square tests. The results indicate that poverty, illiteracy by parents, lack of employment and perceived high school fees are important limits to school attendance and psychosocial problems serve to further support exclusion. The research, based on the Empowerment Theory, points to the structural deprivation as a limitation in children agency. The results emphasize the necessity to implement child-centered educational and social protection interventions.