ABOUT ROOT FOUNDATION
For more than half a decade the Root Foundation has been working in Kigali and its peripheries to give children from vulnerable backgrounds a save place to develop.
The Root Foundation Center is entirely devoted to youth development for street children in Kigali and its peripheries. it expects to bring street children off the street and positively change social as well as economic structures to further develop Rwanda's society. With the help of volunteers from Rwanda and international volunteers, the Root Foundation is able to dedicate as much resources as possible on the children's support.
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Importance of Root Foundation:​
The problem of street children is a growing issue worldwide and the situation of street children in Rwanda remained under-documented. UNICEF estimates there are approximately 100 million street children worldwide, with almost 40 million in Africa. In many African countries, an increasing number of children are being forced to the streets as result of poverty, abuse, torture, rape, abandonment or orphaned by AIDS and human rights violations. Due to a lack of data on the real magnitude of the problem – both from a general perspective and by categories – interventions can only be generalized, without addressing specific aspects related to numbers, sex, origin, underlying causes, and other critical aspects.
It is for this purpose that the National Commission of Rwanda, through MIGEPROF, conducted a study in 2012 about street children in Rwanda, including prevalence, causes, and remedial measures. The lesson learnt from this study shows that if efforts of reintegration and rehabilitation of street children are made in a conducive environment, there are good indications of producing viable results. The issues of financial support, building capacities of institutions dealing with street children, mobilizing the general population on socio-economic factors that are contributing to the street children phenomenon are among the key to durable solutions.However, it seems that NGO's such as the Root Foundation do not have much access to these factors, which is not the outcome of NGOs' freewill to stay independent from the government. National NGOs are dependent on government's support without committing themselves to dependently act in governments interest. It is a matter of collaboration, that is of great importance in order to find durable solutions. Locking at Kigali's situation, there are thousands of children living on the streets of Kigali. In the Gasabo District (Root Foundation's location) the number of street children, at-risk children, or children form vulnerable backgrounds, remains un-measurable high. Most street children live in extreme poverty. Their parents cannot afford the small school fees, money for a uniform or the scholastic materials needed to send their children to school. Many street children are not being fed adequately at home so they take the streets to try and source food, to beg, or to find scrap metal to sell.The children often lose their respect towards their parents, if these are not able to earn enough money to provide for their families. The young children look for new role models they can look up to and who they trust. This results in the fact that the family gets more and more cracks, falls apart and drives the children further and further away from their homes. Too many children do not have a place they can call home. Too many children drop out of school before fourth grade. Too many children go to bed hungry. Sometimes a lot can be done with very little. And the best investment we can make, is in children. The work with human beings from the very beginning of their life.
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