During school hours in the teeming cities of the developing world, they can be seen, shining shoes, washing cars, pushing trolleys or collecting refuse. And those are the lucky ones. Without basic education or proper training, street children are easy prey for drug dealers and pimps. They get arrested, beaten, even murdered by death squads if they live in the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro.
Poverty denies schooling, but exclusion from education in turn perpetuates the cycle of poverty.
Education is the best, and often only means by which a child can break the downward spiral of deprivation. Anjimile Doka of the United Nations Development Programme believes that the inequality between children today is completely unacceptable and the only way to fight it is to give them a chance for education. 100 million of them live in developing nations. An excluded child might be a boy from a South American hill tribe recruited into a mili-tia, or a girl who is a sex worker in an Asian slum. But these, like street children, are at the extreme end of the scale.