On the wall of a shelter home in Cairo. Credit: Rachel Williamson/IPS.

By Rachel Williamson
CAIRO, May 5 2014 (IPS)

Leila*, 19, has a soft, rasping voice and sad eyes. Her face is striped with long scars but nothing in her neat appearance hints that for the last nine years, her ‘home’ has been the streets just north of downtown Cairo.

Using her words sparingly, Leila tells IPS she was just a child when she was raped by her father. Called a liar by her mother and rejected by the rest of her family, she only escaped the beatings that followed by joining the growing ranks of young women who live on Cairo’s dangerous streets.She wants a little empathy for a life she didn’t want and one she hopes her son will never experience.

Life on the street was not easy. Leila endured violence, sexual attacks, police harassment, and rejection by employers when they discovered she was homeless.

Last year it seemed she might be able to leave that life behind after meeting a young man from Sharkeya province in the Delta region. They wed using a form of Islamic marriage not recognised by the state and which is easily ended, but which allows a couple to live together.

Leila became pregnant and the man’s mother threw her out of the house. When she pleaded to her husband for help, he rejected her and the baby.

Leila’s story is all the more horrifying because it’s becoming increasingly common, although there’s no hard data to show many young women are in the same position.

Hend Samy runs a drop-in centre for homeless mothers in the poor suburb of el-Malek el-Saleh for NGO Banat al-Ghad, commonly known as ‘Banati’ or ‘My Girls’.

Photographs and children’s pictures have been hung on the walls, that are painted in bright colours. When IPS visited smears of breakfast were still being scraped from a big dining table. Happy, shrieking children commandeered the floors and stairwells.

Samy, like all sources IPS spoke to, had noticed an increase in the numbers of girls – and later, girls with children – living rough since 2011.

In 2009, a National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) survey said Egypt had 5,299 street children generally. But in 1999 the General Egyptian Association for Child Protection, an NGO, put the figure at two million.

NGOs such as Banati, Plan Egypt and Hope Village provide much needed legal, medical and social support to street mothers. Government organisations such as the NCCM and the Ministry of Social Solidarity have several programmes to meet the needs of street children. But there is little targeted assistance outside Cairo.

Shirley Wang, a researcher at the American University of Cairo, says that poor communication between NGOs and government services leads to duplicated services. She also says that few are trying to change the public perception of street children as “criminal” and “dirty”.

That perception is especially dangerous for vulnerable young women living in a society that prizes female virginity.

In Leila’s words street children are viewed “like they are dogs not humans.”

Nelly Ali, an advocate for Egypt’s street kids, gives an example on her blog of a 14-year-old girl she names Basma from Upper Egypt whose grandfather kept her baby daughter locked in a chicken coop to hide the “shame” of Basma’s rape from the neighbours.

Amira el-Feky, now based in Berlin, used to work with 12-18 year old girls at Hope Village. She explains some of the dangers of the street to IPS.

“Many girls in the street experience sexual violence in one way or another. Some are in an abusive sexual relationship, others get raped or forced to work as sex workers,” she tells IPS.

Drugs are seen by many as a source of relief. El-Feky said one girl would take painkillers because they would make her head feel “light and funny”, while another would take stimulants to stay awake at night and therefore stay safer.

Homeless young mothers are the most vulnerable of street dwellers, and they also have the least legal protection.

“They don’t have any rights. This is why there are NGOs calling for their protection,” Banati executive director Rania Fahmy tells IPS.

Fahmy worked on the 2014 constitution. She said there were two articles that would be good for street mothers: Article 89 which criminalises human trafficking and is a step towards protecting vulnerable young women from being sold into temporary ‘marriages’; and Article 80 which makes the state responsible for protecting children from violence and exploitation.

Article 80 also enshrines in law, for the first time, the age of a child. Fahmy said the Muslim Brotherhood government fought this in the 2012 version of the constitution as they wanted to legalise the practice of child marriage. Now a child in Egypt is anyone under 18.

The constitution states that identification papers are a right. Leila’s voice shakes with worry when she speaks of her three-month old son. He’s healthy, but underweight for his age – and he doesn’t have a birth certificate.

Without a birth certificate a child can’t access state services such as education or health care. Banati and Hope Village have legal units to help mothers get proper documentation for their children.

But Javier Aguilar, chief child protection officer at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says the latter had only managed to register two or three cases in the last five years.

Egypt’s laws governing children are “pretty good” and include community-based protection initiatives, but they simply not being implemented, he tells IPS. “It needs a tremendous effort in mobilising government resources.”

Leila spent half her childhood living on the street, so she has firm ideas what the government should do. She wants the state to shelter homeless people, and provide jobs, healthcare and education.

But more than that, she wants a little empathy for a life she didn’t want and one she hopes her son will never experience.

“I want to tell everyone that they should feel for us.”

*Actual names of mothers and their children have been withheld.

Street vendors in New Delhi demanding their rights. Credit: National Association of Street Vendors of India/IPS.

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, May 3 2014 (IPS)

Bhure Lal, a 33-year-old street-food vendor, has been selling his spicy ‘chaat’ outside the New Delhi Railway Station for 15 years. But despite a punishing 12-hour work schedule, and a new law to protect hawkers like him, he doesn’t take home enough to feed his family.

More than half of Lal’s weekly income from the ‘chaat’, a lip-smacking pot-pourri that is particularly popular with women, is extorted by policemen, he says. He gets to take home about 1,500 rupees (25 dollars) weekly. Noncompliance could mean harassment by the street mafia, forced eviction or even jail.“If I don’t pay, hoodlums dismantle my stall and loot my food."

“If I don’t pay, hoodlums dismantle my stall and loot my food. I have five kids and aged parents to look after,” he told IPS.

According to the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI), the country has 20 million street vendors – believed to be the highest such population in the world – who offer a variety of goods from food to clothes and furniture to toys, especially to the urban poor.

In the absence of a law protecting their right to livelihood, the vendors used to hawk their goods illegally, making them vulnerable to extortion, harassment, heavy fines and sudden evictions. But in 2010, the Supreme Court declared hawking a fundamental right.

The court ruled, “Considering that an alarming percentage of the population in our country lives below the poverty line, and when citizens by gathering meagre resources try to employ themselves as hawkers and street traders they cannot be subjected to a deprivation on the pretext that they have no rights.”

The Indian government then drafted the Street Vendors’ (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill 2012 that was passed by both houses of Parliament. The presidential nod for it came in March this year.

But it is yet to be notified and therefore the law has not been implemented. NGOs blame the delay on the ongoing general elections in India.

The law would entitle every hawker to protection, besides offering identity cards and licences. A chunk of funds under the National Urban Livelihoods Mission would be earmarked for them, but the amount has still not been decided.

The government will also help with banking facilities for vendors under the new legislation. The bill introduces the concept of a town vending committee to regulate vending and to issue licences.

But delayed implementation of the bill is distressing the country’s vendors. Despite the huge vendor population, very few municipalities in India have created vending zones, say activists.

“Under the law, a uniform identification system and vending zones will enable vendors to earn their living peacefully,” Dr. Sharit Bhowmik, a social scientist with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, told IPS.

The vending trade pays some 800 million rupees (13 million dollars) in bribes per year in Mumbai and a similar amount in Delhi, says Bhowmik, who also co-chairs the Greater Mumbai Expert Committee for Street Vendors constituted by the Municipal Commissioner in 2012.

Most vendors in India’s cities are rural migrants or laid-off workers.

“In 1961, 65 percent of Mumbai’s population was in the formal or industrial sector,” says Bhowmik. “However, over the years, the shutting down of Mumbai’s textile mills and other factories meant that today 73 percent of the city’s populace is engaged in the informal sector, a sizeable portion of which is made up of street vendors.”

NASVI, a strong contingent of more than 762 vendor organisations, including 600,000 vendors, is active in 23 out of 28 Indian states. It has been campaigning for vendors’ rights since 2004.

“The government must immediately issue implementation guidelines. This should be a priority for the next government,” Anurag Shankar, project manager at NASVI, told IPS.

Shankar said the new legislation entitles vendors to be included in the National Urban Livelihoods Mission, so that they can receive skill-based training. “The bill gives them the right to livelihood, but they are deprived of facilities like health, housing and education, which people in other unorganised sectors are entitled to.”

The new law too does not offer these facilities.

Ram Pyare, a street vendor in south Delhi who has faced many rounds of eviction since the 2010 Commonwealth Games, said, “No facilities like housing or education are available to us while the mafia continues to deprive us of our hard-earned wages.”

A 2001 study by the International Labour Organisation on Mumbai revealed that 85 percent of Indian street vendors were suffering from stress-related diseases like migraine, heartburn, hypertension and high blood pressure.

NASVI national coordinator Arbind Singh said their organisation is fighting “tooth and nail” to reclaim the rights of street vendors.

“The severity of the problem can be gauged from the fact that there’s not a single vendor in the country who is free from the tyranny of paying extortion money.”

Bhowmik as well as NASVI officials say vendors have been taking loans from moneylenders at high interest rates while losing almost 50 percent of their income to bribes, and in the process earning less than the minimum wage (of around two dollars a day) for unskilled workers. This is not expected to change at least until the new law becomes a ground reality.