Urban child poverty in Kampala city, insights from children’s drawings

In many urban areas, rapid urbanization, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, has overwhelmed technical and administrative capacity to provide adequate services. This has led to various challenges of urban sustainability, including urban child poverty, known to worsen the cognitive and emotional well-being of such children. We aimed to gain an understanding of and provide evidence on urban child poverty in Uganda through children’s diagrammatic representations of the drivers, effects, and needed interventions. We used children’s drawings, in-depth interpretations of these drawings, and observations. Using a two-stage sampling strategy, data were collected from four poor slum zones within Kampala city. Through purposive sampling, 26 deprived slum dwelling children aged between 7 and 15 years, who were willing to take part in the study, were asked to share their stories regarding their experiences of urban poverty using drawings, and generating narratives about them. Data analysis was done using a participatory design of the code-book, drawing visualization, and analysis. Some verbatim statements were also picked directly from raw data and used to strengthen this analysis and reporting. Children were well conversant with the problem of urban child poverty based on its causes, manifestations, and effects. Children expressed that urban child poverty was linked to domestic violence, lack of parental care, chronic sickness, orphanhood, and the absence of child support services in the community. Effects of urban poverty included the inability to use medical facilities, lack of access to information, ill health, coping with street life through violence, poor shelter, overcrowding, lack of social capital, and being excluded from basic decision-making processes at all levels. There is also a need to build on the available child rights initiatives in urban areas and elsewhere as a means to reduce these urban distortions. Continuous investment in research to present the different experiences of urban vulnerable groups should also be done to underpin evidence-based urban programming.