The charity Street Child of Sierra Leone has published a head count of youngsters with no fixed abode, developed with 62 NGOs and the Freetown government
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. The founding fathers anticipated this executive dictum, and mandated a census in the US constitution. A decent head count was a precondition to the sound governance of their new republic, and has since become essential to planning public services everywhere. The world's street children, by contrast, are not properly measured tallies of households, and – as every heartbreaking tale of slavery, prostitution or brushes with the recruiting sergeant confirms – they are consigned to unmanaged fates. Today the charity Street Child of Sierra Leone publishes a head count of youngsters with no fixed abode, developed with 62 NGOs and the Freetown government. By enumerating the 50,000 kids who rely on the street for their livelihood and the 3,000 who actually sleep there, the census forces the world to face the facts. And by counting these forgotten children, it just might make them count.