preliminary chapter:
INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY
I. Introduction
Floating here and there in the streets of all developing
countries, street children are one of the most direct visible impacts of
poverty. All of us, having one time travelled in a developing country, remember
the picture of some children, working as shoeshiners or begging, in order to
get some money for themselves or their families.
We all remember our first feeling, mixed with pity and
compassion, and our misunderstanding of such difficult lifestyle: so young,
being already so poor. Looking at them, we want to help them; as they are on
streets to get money, we think first of giving them some money. But, soon after
our hands had reached our pockets, our mind becomes troubled, facing a profound
dilemma, and asking ourselves many questions: is giving money the best
solution? Will the child buy useful things, or buy drugs and worsens his
situation? But, at the same time, can we be passive? So, how can we do to help
them?
Our paper is attempting to answer this question, by focusing
on one of the most revolutionary tool of last few years: microfinance. Indeed,
it has been largely demonstrated how the provision of financial services to the
poor brought enormous success to their lives, enhancing their economic
capacities and giving them the opportunity to take their future in their own
hands, rather than being passive recipients of aid. However, although one of
the stated goals of microfinance is to improve the children and youth future
through the help provided to the family, very few attempts has been done in
order to address them directly, assuming that, first, they do not need and,
even if they do, providing them with financial services is not appropriate.
Our discussion will therefore analyse this assumption, in
application with a particular segment of the child/youth population: the street
children. We will therefore assess, in the following pages, whether
microfinance is an appropriate tool to address the street children issue.
However, answering this question requires adopting a
comprehensive approach which is at the intersection of an economical, a child
development, and a management thematic. In order to do so, we will structure
our paper in three chapters.
The first chapter enlightens what is already known about
street children, defining the concept and glancing at their general
characteristics, such as their family relations, their economic activities,
their vulnerability and their capacities. After having drawn this basic
profile, we discuss the causes of the street children issue, by pointing out
which parameters need to be incorporated in our causal analysis. Then, we
highlight the consequences of such phenomenon, both for the child and the
society at large. Finally, we discuss some ideological considerations related
to street children and child work, by framing which position may be the most
adequate in analysing child work and which model of child development will be
ours in the following chapters.
Having a better knowledge on street children and a model of
child development, we proceed to a zoom on Bangladesh, by analysing the demand
of street children for financial services.
Indeed, this step is a first requirement before discussing
microfinance: if street children do not need financial services for any
imaginable reason, there is no reason for trying to find a way to provide it to
them.
We therefore let street children express themselves and
underline their main demand drivers for financial services.
After having analysed this demand, our third chapter moves to
a supply side perspective and discuss the appropriate way to match the street
children demand. In order to achieve this task, we first define the concept of
microfinance, by bringing to light its main products and mechanisms, and then
move on to our matching process, by taking into account the learning of our two
previous chapters, and by building on the existing learning points of three
programs already addressing street children with microfinance. We then
introduce two evaluation criteria that will follow us through our process:
effectiveness and sustainability. This helps us to build a
comprehensive microfinance plus model, by going through two
intermediary stages: a minimalist microfinance framework, and a microfinance
plus framework.
This task being achieved, we turn to our case study in order
to test the validity of our model by analysing the effectiveness and the
sustainability of Padakhep's microfinance program, a Bangladeshi microfinance
institution addressing street children with microfinance, and then moving on to
some recommendations for Padakhep and a final conclusion bringing up the main
lessons learned through the paper, as well as some perspectives for the future.
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