Children

• 8 to 12% of all children under the age 18 are working or living on the streets of Honduras (200,000 - 300,000 children)
• There are around 800 kids living on the streets of Tegucigalpa alone. These do not include the thousands that are working on the streets of Tegucigalpa.
• The number of street kids have continued to grow eight-fold over the last decade

Reasons Why Street Kids Are On Their Own

• Domestic Violence
• Sexual abuse
• Substance use
• Natural Disasters
• Economic Crisis
• Loss of family through accidents
• Fear of going home with no money from a day of begging

Risks On The Streets

• Physical violence
• Substance abuse (glue is the number one substance abused)
• Malnutrition
• STD's
• Kidnapping
• Infections (often life threatening)
• Death

Country Background

• Population 7.7 million
• 40.7% under the age of 15
• 45% of the population live in urban areas
• 75% live in poverty
• 55% live in extreme poverty
• 12% live on less than a $1 a day
• Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere
• Oct. 1998, Hurricane Mitch killed some 13,000 people, left 2 million homeless, and over $5 billion in damages