PAPUA NEW GUINEA – Urban migration is leading to an increase in the number of homeless children in Papua New Guinea capital.

A US Department of State report on monitoring and combatting trafficking in persons has warned the PNG government that homeless children are in danger of human trafficking and other forms of abuse.

In a park near the centre of Port Moresby, around 20 children huddle around a small fire most nights where they often eat and sleep in a public toilet.

David Depe, one of the boys who sleep in a public toilet, said they have no place to go.

PNG’s capital city is said to be one of the world’s most dangerous cities in the world.

The boys on the street range between 12 and 18 years of age – they rarely have enough to eat and don’t go to school.

Willy John, one of the youngest boys, said he started staying at the toilet after his mother died.

“Mother passed away, so I come here to sleep with my elder brothers. I look for food on my own and I survive by my own strength,” he said.

A local charity organisation estimates around 5000 children sleep on the capital’s streets.

“We have over 5000 homeless children in Port Moresby and this is a lot for us,” said Collin Pake, who runs the charity Life Care PNG that occasionally provides food for the children.

Pake, who also runs an orphanage in the city, said they cannot care for every child on the street.

The overcrowded three-bedroom orphanage run by Pake and his wife Freda only takes in 45 children at a time – they could barely afford to provide the basics for them.

“We provide food and water, love and care and we also give them education,” Pake said.

PNG’s National Office of Child and Family Service (NOCFS) is working on implementing The Lukautim Pikinini (Looking After Children) Act of 2009 aimed at protecting children from exploitation.

The acting chief executive officer of the NOCFS, Simon Yanis, said they will address the problem.

“We will be going out there to interview them, process them and put them into out-of-home cares,” he said.

The policy involves identifying street children, rehabilitating them in an out-of-home care and reintegrating them back into their families.

A survey of 300 street children in Port Moresby showed that only about one in 10 children are actually homeless, while the other nine are out on the streets because of peer pressure, Yanis said

He blamed the children’s homelessness on rural to urban migration.

“The parents are illiterate parents from the village, they migrated here to the city’s highlights and they think they want to find a cleaning job somewhere, but with no accommodation,” he said.

Authorities at the NOCFS said they are building a database that will log cases of homelessness and neglect, which will allow them to start processing children and prosecuting parents who fail in their duties.

They pledged to ask the PNG government to allocate funding in its 2019 budget to combatting children homelessness.

- ABC