As one child explained, "I lost my parents three years ago and since then I have been living in the streets without shelter and assurance of having food every day. Nobody cares about me; whether I live or not. People don't want to look at me. I’m trash. I don't want to live in the streets, but I have nobody. My uncle beat me hard when I lived there, and so I ran. Living in the street is the only way to survive".

Many of these children end up on the streets after being orphaned, abandoned or are sent there by poor parents to either work or beg, and of course, cities like Nairobi are well known for their numbers of child prostitutes. Most are branded 'chokora' (scavengers) and elicit not just little sympathy, but physical abuse including by the police.

For example there was what can be described as a 'raid' on the street children of Eldoret, the fifth most populated urban area in the country after Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru and Ruiru. The police descended on the children, allegedly beating as they went, forcing them into the already surging Sosiani river that runs alongside the area where the children are forced to live, a dump known locally as the 'California Barracks'.

Six children died in that episode and, over the next two days, the corpses of five more children washed downstream. The youngest of them was just nine years old. Such are the number of street children in some of the towns that they have their own 'code' with the streets being divided up into age zones, with street children who stray outside their designated area at risk of physical punishment by older children.