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The expression "street children" conceals a reality more complex than it appears. At the root of this phenomenon lies a system of solidarity that has been transformed by urbanization, poverty and the commodification of social relationships.
In many West African countries, such as Mali, some children spend the day there before returning home. Others have been entrusted to relatives in the city and gradually find themselves exposed to exploitation, family breakdown, or begging.
As an anthropologist, I conducted field research in the streets of Bamako between 2017 and 2025. I combined semi-structured interviews – by day and by night, on patrol – with the children I met, along with extended participant observation. It is this combination, particularly the nighttime work, that allowed me to understand this complex reality.
In reality, several categories of children intersect within the same space, without the boundary between them always being visible at first glance.
Categories of Children in the Street
As early as 1985, the Grand-Bassam Forum, organized in Côte d'Ivoire by the International Catholic Child Bureau (BICE) and UNICEF, had already attempted to clarify matters by distinguishing between children "in the street" (who spend the day there before returning to a home in the evening) and children "of the street", in total breakdown from any family, who live and sleep there.
This distinction remains accurate, but it is difficult to observe during the day. Girls, for example, also occupy public space (selling drinks, fruit, or street food) before disappearing at nightfall. Boys, meanwhile, split between those who go home and those who stay.
To understand this phenomenon, one must trace it back to its source: the traditional practice known as fostering, widespread in many West African societies. Within this practice, a child belongs not only to their biological parents, but to an entire extended kinship network. This network can legitimately decide to entrust the child to another family member, often in the city, to provide them with a better education, a craft apprenticeship, or simply a future the village can no longer guarantee.
A Quasi-Market Logic Takes Hold
This practice, once founded on a principle of reciprocity and solidarity within families, is today profoundly challenged by urbanization and the monetization of social relationships. And this may well be the most significant finding of my fieldwork.
Contrary to the idea of a gradual deterioration triggered by a later shock (a death, a remarriage, an economic hardship), the rupture is often present within the fostering arrangement itself, from the moment the child arrives with their hosts.
This observation echoes the work of anthropologist Mélanie Jacquemin, who showed, in Côte d'Ivoire, that village families themselves are now hesitant to entrust their daughters, lacking any assurance of reciprocity in return.
For their part, many urban families today prefer to hire paid domestic help rather than take in a niece or young cousin from the village. The employment relationship is seen as simpler, without the emotional and social obligations that a kinship tie entails. Traditional fostering thus finds itself competing with a quasi-market logic from the very outset of the placement — not merely in its later abuses.
Risk of Rupture
This shift is not unique to Mali. In Senegal, begging by talibé children entrusted to Quranic teachers has intensified since the massive exodus of many Quranic teachers to cities in the 1970s, following a severe drought. Kadessa Arissabe Sané, who devoted her doctoral thesis to this phenomenon in 2017, shows that this begging has evolved into a genuine social order, paradoxically sustained by a population that continues to view it as a religiously valued act of almsgiving.
In Benin and Togo, a comparable phenomenon exists under the name vidomégon (literally "placed child"), with the same drift toward domestic exploitation when the practice escapes any protective framework.
Children who genuinely end up on the streets, in total rupture, remain exposed to considerable dangers: traffic accidents, untreated illnesses, sometimes death, without it always being possible to identify their relatives.
Yet it would be wrong to believe that most children traditionally circulating between families are in this extreme situation. Most retain a home to return to, even when their days are spent in the street. This reality has not escaped lawmakers.
In most of these West African countries, laws do indeed exist to penalize abuses arising from traditional fostering solidarity. In Mali, for example, begging and its incitement are prohibited by law.
Ineffective Sanctions
But the gap between the law and its enforcement remains considerable. Without effective sanctions, these provisions struggle to produce the intended effects. The phenomenon of children and families begging in the streets has thus become commonplace, as widespread a social phenomenon as the legislation meant to regulate it.
Nothing lasting can be built, however, without the resolute involvement of the authorities and the State, at every level of the administrative hierarchy. This mobilization must be combined with the sustained action of civil society — non-governmental organizations and local associations.
It must also draw on the contribution of academic networks producing, from their own fieldwork, scientific knowledge that is directly applicable to child protection, community mediation and nutritional security. The Réseau EnfanceAfrique is one such example.
It is precisely this nuance that paves the way for responses more finely adapted to on-the-ground realities, capable of targeting the actual turning points rather than treating this population uniformly.
One must understand a society before seeking to transform it. This is an obvious truth too often forgotten by child protection policies. Yet it remains the only path toward solutions that last.
What Can Be Done?
Two concrete levers emerge from this finding. On one hand, support must be tailored to the nature of the placement and the degree of rupture already established. The majority of children, whose family ties remain active, require preventive support aimed at preserving these ties, rather than a response limited to crisis management.
Placements through intermediaries with no family ties, on the other hand, already amount, in practice, to a form of informal labor requiring a dedicated legal framework.
On the other hand, narrowing the gap between the law and its application requires coordination that is still largely absent today between the State, civil society and field research networks. This combination is the only one capable of documenting, with the precision this subject demands, the situations that genuinely tip into danger.