Sometimes the Child Is Not Where the Problem Begins.

Sometimes the Child Is Not Where the Problem Begins

Welcome to the Mellow Madness update, a space for thinking out loud about strategy, leadership, and the lessons business sometimes teaches us when we least expect them.

What working with street-connected children is teaching me about treating causes, not just symptoms.

One of the most difficult things about trying to solve a social problem is discovering that the problem you can see is not necessarily where the problem began. I have been thinking about this through my work with Empower The Future in Kigali, where I serve as the Fundraising, Partnerships & Donor Relations Officer. The organisation works with street-connected children, helping them rebuild their lives through rehabilitation, education, skills and support. It is important work, but being close to it has exposed me to a more complicated reality: sometimes getting a child off the street is only the beginning.

The obvious problem is the child on the street. That is what society sees. We see a young person who needs food, shelter, education, counselling, discipline or rehabilitation, and understandably our intervention focuses on that child. But as Empower The Future worked more closely with these young people, another question became increasingly difficult to ignore: why was the child on the street in the first place?

There is rarely one answer. Every child has a different story, and it would be irresponsible to reduce something as complex as street-connected childhood to 

a single cause. What we have discovered, however, is that in some cases the street is not where the problem began. The problem began at home. 

A household may be under severe economic pressure. A parent may have few employable skills or reliable sources of income. Relationships within the family may have broken down. The pressures inside the home can become so difficult that the street becomes an alternative for the child. In those circumstances, rehabilitating the young person without strengthening the environment to which they may return risks addressing the visible consequence while leaving some of its causes untouched.

That realisation has changed how Empower The Future thinks about rehabilitation. Some of the parents of the children we work with are now becoming students themselves, learning practical skills such as tailoring, knitting, woodworking and liquid-soap making. The intention is not simply to add another programme to the organisation. It comes from a deeper question: if instability within the home contributes to a child ending up on the street, could strengthening the parent also strengthen the child’s chances of staying off it?

I find that question fascinating because it challenges the way we often design social impact. Organisations understandably like clearly defined beneficiaries and interventions because they make programmes easier to explain, fund and measure. If you rehabilitate street-connected children, the child is the beneficiary. The logic appears straightforward. Yet families do not experience their problems according to our programme categories.

The child belongs to a family. The family exists within an economic environment. Economic pressure can affect relationships, choices and stability, and those conditions can influence the opportunities available to the child. Once you begin looking at the problem this way, rehabilitation becomes more than changing the circumstances of one young person. It requires understanding the environment surrounding that young person.

There is an important caution here. Teaching a parent tailoring or woodworking does not automatically repair a broken household, just as learning to make liquid soap does not guarantee sustainable income. Skills require markets, tools, capital, confidence and opportunity, while family breakdown can have causes that economic empowerment alone cannot solve. The lesson is not that parent training is a magic solution. It is that better interventions begin with a better diagnosis of the problem.

Perhaps because I come from strategy and branding, I recognise this pattern. 

A company may approach you convinced that it has a communication problem because sales are declining. The temptation is to redesign the identity, create a campaign or increase advertising. But communication may simply be where the problem has become visible. The real problem could be the product, customer experience, positioning, culture, distribution or leadership. A brilliant campaign applied to the wrong diagnosis simply makes the wrong solution more expensive.

Social problems are obviously far more complex and consequential, but the strategic principle is similar: before solving what you can see, understand what produced it.

This has also changed how I think about fundraising. My role at Empower The Future could easily be described as finding donors to fund activities. Increasingly, I see it differently. Good fundraising should help finance outcomes, not simply programmes. If the outcome we ultimately care about is a young person building a stable and productive life away from the street, then we have to be intellectually honest about what achieving that outcome may require. Sometimes that means supporting the child directly. Sometimes it means strengthening the family around them. Often it requires partnerships, because no single organisation can or should attempt to solve every part of such a complicated problem.

This is a useful question beyond Empower The Future. Across Africa, enormous resources are invested in responding to visible problems. We see unemployment and create training programmes. We see children out of school and build classrooms. We see poverty and provide assistance. Many of these interventions are necessary and valuable, but the harder strategic question is what produced the condition in the first place, and whether our intervention changes that condition or simply manages its consequences.

At Empower The Future, we are still learning. I would rather acknowledge that than turn a developing programme into a premature success story. The parents learning practical skills today will teach us more about what works, what does not and what additional support families may need. But the thinking behind the programme has already reinforced something important for me: sustainable impact often requires us to travel further upstream than the problem we can immediately see.

Sometimes helping a child means working directly with the child. Sometimes, if we want that change to last, we also have to strengthen the home they should be able to return to.

If You’d Like to Be Part of This;

Empower The Future is continuing its work with street-connected children while strengthening the families and environments around them. If you would like to support this work, you can contribute through  ⁠our donation page. 

If you are interested in partnering with us, supporting a programme or simply learning more, email me at mellow@bshopafrica.com or visit  ⁠Empower The Future.

donation page: https://venmo.com/u/EmpowertheFuture

visit Empower the Future: https://empowerthefuture.rw/

Because sometimes the most powerful way to help a child leave the street is to help rebuild what they can return to.

Thank you for reading.

Warm regards,