Emily Maere had gone into the city of Blantyre to buy stock for her little grocery shop. As usual, she decided not to travel with cash but to use an ATM when she got there., was mugged. To her shock, her attackers were children. “No sooner had I finished the withdrawal than the group of street children attacked me, snatching my purse,” she says.at 2am on the streets of the capital, Lilongwe.
“These children do not have proper accommodation – some live under bridges – and access to food is a major challenge. Hence they rob people to feed themselves,” he says. Children cook maize at a camp for displaced people. About 5.8 million people in Malawi face moderate or chronic food insecurity.Gertrude Banda, 35, a mother of five from Balaka district in southern Malawi says her family has been facing hunger for 10 years. “This area does not receive good rainfall, I cannot manage to harvest enough maize to last me the whole year, and I mostly depend on menial jobs,” she says.
Surviving is not easy. We mostly depend on handouts from kind people, and can at times scavenge dumped food from restaurantsMost of the children interviewed by the Guardian in Blantyre and Lilongwe said they had run away from home because there was not enough food. They went to the cities looking for work but ended up sleeping rough under bridges or on building sites, and joining forces with other children.[street child] is not easy,” says a boy named Chisomo.
. The nearly ten trillion dollars global health spending needs to prioritize fundamental requirements for health, such as healthy and safe housing and the ability to buy healthy food. .