Summary
- The Boakai government’s flagship program to get children off the streets is falling behind. The program promised to move 73,000 children back to families in five years, but two years in, the project is not on track, and there is little transparency.
- The government has received little of the $15 million projected budget from donors and has put up just $1.3 million.
- Advocates say the project falls far short of the exploding numbers of street children. A 2024 report found 366,00 Liberian children living in “street situations.” The number has likely grown as poverty rises.
By Augusta S. Lafalay, senior reporter with New Narratives
WEST POINT, Monrovia – When school lets out here in this informal settlement on the seashore, 15-year-old Stanley does not go home to rest or study for the next day. He picks up a bundle of plastic bags and walks towards the traffic, selling until dark. He then carries whatever he makes back to his mother and grandmother.
His classmates see him out there and laugh at him. He has cried over it before, he says, but he keeps coming back because the family needs the money. His mother sells cooked creamy wheat in a wheel barrow but her income is not enough to cover their needs.
“I want people to know me as a student, not the boy selling plastic bags in traffic,” he said. “But if I don’t sell plastic bags in the street, I won’t carry recess to school or get other things like my friends.”
Even still, Stanley is luckier than many of the hundreds of thousands of children found to be living on the streets in a 2024 government-backed survey, supported by UNICEF, that said more than 366,000 were children living in “street situations” nationwide. A Front Page Africa/New Narratives report found many of the children were forced into drug use, selling, and prostitution and had given birth to babies who also lived on the streets. As climate change and price rises have tipped more people into poverty since then, the number has certainly risen.
The survey prompted the Boakai administration to launch its flagship “Support a Child, Save the Future” initiative to remove 73,000 children like Stanley from Liberia’s streets over five years through school enrollment, family reunification and support grants for caregivers. The first two phases of the program alone were estimated to cost $15 million. But that was almost entirely dependent on support from donors. The government committed just US$300,000 when the program was first launched and followed it with US$500,000 the next year. Since it was announced, donors have slashed hundreds of millions in annual support for the country. The project is now 95 percent funded by the government, according to a ministry official.
The project’s progress is unclear. Sylvesterus Armand Johnson, the project’s coordinator at the Ministry of Gender, said nearly 24,000 children have been reached so far and just over 4,000 of them have been placed in school. Johnson did not provide supporting evidence for the figure beyond a screenshot of a factsheet shared via WhatsApp.
Abraham M.T. Sagi Jr. and Ellen Sagi, both 18, are two of the children who have been helped by the project. Both now attend Picoli Academy, Gardnerville. Both used to beg on the streets to help their families, whose fathers live with disabilities. Abraham’s father is visually impaired.
Abraham said he spent long days begging from morning until night instead of focusing on school. “It was stressful and discouraging, especially seeing other children going to school while I was trying to help my family survive,” he said.
People sometimes made hurtful remarks as Ellen begged, telling her that instead of asking for money, she should be selling something. “Those experiences were painful and made life even harder,” she said.
The project identified the two children’s families and helped enroll her in school. It now pays their school fees and provides books, uniforms, shoes and bags. “Now I can stay in the classroom, study, and concentrate on building my future. I no longer have to return to the streets to beg,” Abraham said. The program “has changed my life and given me hope for a better future,” said Ellen.
Both are already looking beyond school. Ellen’s dream is to learn tailoring so she can become self-reliant. Abraham wants to pursue business skills training so that he can build a better future for himself and his family.
Johnson K. Dorbor, president of the Hoping God Association of the Blind, said it has brought meaningful change to many families, especially those of people with disabilities and other vulnerable households. Children from those families are enrolled at schools including Perfect Grace, Daniel Memorial and Picoli, where the program covers tuition and provides school uniforms, bags, shoes and other learning materials.Parents get help too. Some received small livelihood grants of between US$100 and US$120 to start or strengthen a small business, Dorbor said. His own wife uses their grant to support the household and their children’s education. Social workers regularly visit the community to encourage children to stay in school and to support parents, he said. About 62 children in his association are currently benefiting.
A limited project without transparency has advocates calling for an overhaul
But advocates say they have no way of knowing if the project has achieved measurable success. There has been no independent audit as would be required in a donor-funded project “to know as to whether the very children that they are claiming to take off the street are not going back in the street,” Kalifala Kromah, chairperson of the Child Protection Network of Liberia, a government-led coalition of ministries, civil society groups, UN agencies and other partners working to coordinate efforts to protect children.
Getting a child into a classroom does not settle what comes next. Dorbor said many families still struggle to pay rent and put food on the table, and some parents work long hours just to provide the next day’s meals.
“Children learn best when their basic needs are met,” he said. He asked the government and its partners to bring in school feeding programs, help vulnerable families with housing, and keep funding the program beyond its five years, so that more children stay in school and away from the streets.
Johnson acknowledges the project is dramatically underfunded compared with the original plan. There is a direct 2026 budget line of US$296,000, topped up with a US$200,000 supplementary allocation, according to Johnson, putting the year’s funding close to US$500,000.
Cumulative government commitments since the launch come to just under $1.3 million against the US$15 million estimated for the first two phases alone. That is less than nine cents of every dollar the program’s own architects said it needed, with two of the five years already gone.
“Even if we were going at a pace of $500,000 [a year] … in five years’ time, it’s not going to even equate to $15 million,” said Andrew Tehmeh, former county director of Street Child Liberia, “Resource mobilization is far below the targeted amount.”
The funding gap has led to a staffing shortage. Johnson said the ministry deployed around 50 social workers for the pilot phase to track thousands of children nationwide. That forced civil society groups to step in and undertake documentation work the ministry could not keep pace with alone.
Tehmeh said the hardest cases remain the ones the program struggles most to resolve: children with disabilities or those whose disabled parents, who rely on them to beg.
“Every time you got them all, you kind of saw them back again,” he said.
Johnson confirmed that the ministry only recently began a targeted approach with the National Commission on Disability, acknowledging that some caregiver grants intended for small businesses were instead diverted to other uses. He maintains that the program is on track and hopes it will eventually be absorbed into permanent ministry operations rather than ending when its five years run out.
A Children’s Rights Law that has been ignored
Experts said the whole program was unnecessary from the start. Liberia already has a legal tool designed to address exactly this problem: the Children’s Rights Law of 2011 – which provides a range of policies to reduce the number of street children, but which has never been enforced. The law calls for a standing Child Rights Advancement Fund meant to pool government and donor money and a Child Well-Being Council to coordinate child protection efforts across the government permanently. Neither has been established more than a decade on. Advocates said that failure, more than any single funding shortfall, explains why the country is falling behind.
“The law is better than whatever intervention is being done,” said Kromah. “That will be a statutory and holistic means of protection for children instead of short-term projects.”
Kromah said the funding shortfall is exactly why a legally mandated fund matters more than a project budget line. A standing Child Rights Advancement Fund, he said, provided by the bill, could pool government and donor contributions in one place instead of leaving the program dependent on whatever a single ministry can secure in each budget cycle.
“If the fund is established, partners can come in and support the fund,” he said. Without it, “everybody will want to own their own project, and there will be no coordination.”
“Help me feed my family, pay my rent, and survive with dignity”
Seven-year-old Alice attends school, but her mind is often not on her studies. When classes end, she returns to the traffic at 72nd Junction, where she moves between cars to raise money for school expenses and food for her family. She says she knows the street is dangerous but feels she has little choice.
“If somebody wants to help me,” Stanley said, “I’m asking for two things: pay my school fees and help my family. If that happens, I will leave the street the same day. I want to stay in school and learn. I don’t want to grow up begging between cars.”
Patience, Alice’s mother, keeps her daughter in school at a painful cost. The 40-year-old, who has a disability, begs at 72nd Junction alongside her daughter. She says removing children from the streets without supporting the families they depend on will not solve the problem.
“I am not asking the government to leave my child on the street,” Patience said. “I am asking them to give us a way to live. Send my child to school, yes, but help me feed my family, pay my rent, and survive with dignity.”
This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project. Funding was provided by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency in Liberia. The funder had no say in the story’s content.