Street Child (former Children in Crisis)

Street Child is a UK charity, established in 2008, that aims to create educational opportunity for some of the most vulnerable children in West Africa.

Starting in Sierra Leone, then the poorest country in the world, we have supported over 20,000 urban and rural children to access a quality education.

Together with our local partners, the charity has grown since 2008 from one project for 100 children in Northern Sierra Leone, to one of the most broad-reaching charities currently working in the region with 30 projects in multiple countries.

Street Child's principal focus is upon empowering children by giving them the chance to go to school and giving their families the wherewithal to keep them there.

Street Child helps children into education in the world’s toughest places. Street Child’s vision is a world where it is seen as unacceptable for a child not to be in education. But today there are 121 million school-aged children around the world who are not in education. Millions more children are in school but failing to learn. Street Child believes that education is a fundamental right and achieving universal basic education is the single greatest step that can be taken towards the eliminating the inequality gap and ultimately global poverty. We go to places where others don’t go – some of the world’s toughest places - where we seek out remote, hard-to-reach, fragile and disaster-affected states that are forgotten about and ignored and where our pragmatic and cost-effective approaches can make a real difference to a child’s future. We work to remove the complex social, economic and structural barriers to education wherever they lie. We are there to close the gaps through which the most marginalised children can slip. Our work includes not only building schools and training teachers but also child protection and livelihood support to ensure that children have access to education. Wherever we work we partner with local organisations and communities which allows us to be responsive and nimble. We use simple, low cost and replicable solutions that allow us to create maximum impact for the most children. We started out supporting 100 street children in Sierra Leone in 2008 and by 2023 we aim to have supported 1 million more marginalised children into education in some of the world’s toughest places.