GUEST COLUMNIST: Our social, economic system has abandoned disadvantaged children

Growing up, I spent many evenings at Coco-Beach, but I was always taught to be vigilant and careful because the people there were dangerous. After my 18 years, I decided to develop a personal relationship with the beach community and find out what challenges would bring someone to live in a bush by the beach. With that I unearthed a can of worms that really opened my eyes to the desperation and vulnerability of the community in Coco-Beach.

Coincidentally Coco-Beach is in the centre of Masaki, home to Tanzania’s only billionaire but it is also home to Emma, a 17-year-old beach girl whose name I have changed to protect her identity. Emma’s life reflects the breaks and cracks of our society, which has made poverty a vicious and endless cycle.

Emma left her home when she was still a child because she was being sexually abused. At the age of 14, she began selling drugs for a pimp and spent a month in one of the most highly secured prisons in Tanzania, originally designed for savage criminals.

It is exactly things like these that make me question, shouldn’t we be imprisoning the system and its perpetrators that have thrown her out and made her a child of the streets. If you ask me I would say that we are criminals for not having an effective and universal social welfare system that every child -- like Emma -- who comes from unimaginably difficult circumstances can turn to and reform their lives.

What is even more criminal, in my opinion, is the fact that Coco-Beach is in the centre of rapid economic development with land cruisers lined up in traffic at every corner, but in the very same streets, there are children like Emma stuck in this vicious cycle, unable to change their lives. How, as a nation, do we help these children have a better future? What policies do we formulate that will ensure that in the next twenty or thirty years we won’t have a street children problem in this country?

Until we have those policies children like Emma will be left on the street, suffering and vulnerable to every imaginable danger that no one would like his/her daughter to come across with.

For Emma’s case, and every child that lives the same life as her, she is left alone by the beach, forced to form friendships and relationships with older men simply to protect her – at a price known between the protector and the protected.

She is determined to be financially independent, but you and I know that there is not much stability and change that Sh3,000 a day can bring. The permanent narrative which has also been evident in my several conversations with friends, family and strangers, is that people like Emma cannot be helped.

I cannot tell you strongly enough how much I detest this defeatist mentality that comes from a place of pure ignorance and selfishness. It is the type of thinking which assumes that some people in our society are less deserving of living a decent life that has kept an estimated 437,500 children on the streets of Tanzania.

Well, against the advice of most people close to me, for the first time, I sat down with the beach community, with no barriers and heard their laughs and cries of where they have come from and where they want to be.

Some of the teenage boys want to continue their education and get different jobs, they are tired of selling roasted cassava for a living, but the way our society is organised – a way that only the fittest survives – there has been created a permanent place for poor people at the bottom, with no ladder to climb up.

But it can be changed. With a strong will and commitment to look at the way we treat the disadvantaged together with a determination to right the wrongs already committed millions of Emmas can be lifted out of poverty and have a better and prosperous future.

Maliha Sumar is an 18-year-old climate and human rights activist based in Dar es Salaam. She can be reached via [email protected] and @sumarmaliha on Twitter.