Inter-Urban Concentration of Street Children in Southwestern Nigeria

Abstract

The scant literature  of street children has virtually focused only on the phenomenon's intra–urban variation. This has made it difficult to evolve an all-inclusive recommendation to solve similar problems in other cities because of the varying levels of urbanisation. It is against this background that this study analyses the inter-urban concentration of street children phenomenon in the selected cities of Southwestern Nigeria. Using a multistage sampling method, with residential neighbourhoods and street child “hot spots†as parameters, street children enumeration was conducted in forty-five Data Collection Areas (DCAs) across the three cities. The variations in the occurrence of street children among the selected cities were examined through the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). Street Child Concentration Index (SCCI) was developed to analyze the inter-urban variations in the severity of the problem. The ANOVA results show that the observed differences in the occurrence of street children from among three areas of study are statistically significant. (f = 14.636; p = 0.0000). Nevertheless, the results of SCCI indicate that child streetism is more severe in Ibadan (2.18) than in Osogbo (1.45) and Akure (1.15). The study concludes that child streetism is a product of urbanization and the quality of urban management. Therefore, it recommends effective urban planning and management as antidotes to the seemingly intractable problem of street children.