Parents and guardians are forcing their kids to beg in the streets for their own monetary benefit, Kenyan Bulletin has learned.
Most of these guardians who survive on below average wage and have children who are living with disabilities are placing them in strategic places in major towns in the country where they can beg for petty cash from the public and at the end of the day their guardians take all the money.
“We have realized that there is a new formula of conning the unsuspecting public of money. The children who look so desperate beg from the town dwellers who give them a lot of money only for their guardians to pick everything at the end of the day,” Narok Children Officer, Pilot Khaemba recently told the media.
Khaemba was speaking after his office recently rescued a ten-year-old, physically challenged girl from the streets of Narok town.
The girl had initially informed officers that her parents hails from Tanzania and that she was begging for cash to raise bus fare to go back home.
However, upon investigations, the children officer said the mother of the girl was identified as one Joyce Njeri, a Kenyan who even benefits from the Orphans Vulnerable Children Cash Transfer (OVC-CT) programme.
As in most of the other cities, the children are trained on how to beg for money from vulnerable strangers, they will ask for money mostly to cover medical bills, givers will throw in huge bills while reluctant ones will be lured in by the last humble appeal to at least buy the kids lunch.
These ‘street’ children are then placed outside leading supermarkets and eating joints in order to guilt trip Kenyans. These are children who should be in school getting education but instead are getting exploited.
