The high cost of living has taken a toll on street children in Molo, Nakuru County, forcing them to resort to killing and cooking dogs to sustain themselves.
The number of street children has become more prevalent in Molo, where the majority have fled their homes due to domestic abuse.
Residents of the area claim that the children killed the dog and roasted it over an open fire in an abandoned structure.
“They are idlers with no work to do… I cannot blame them for opting for a dog, flour is now around Sh250,” Molo resident Anthony Mwangi told a local Tv station.
Due to the difficult economic conditions prevailing throughout the nation, the urchins are said to have been having a difficult time without anyone coming to their assistance.
The majority of the children, who are under 15 and are from informal settlements, only make a living by begging and occasionally bothering neighbours in order to obtain food and money.
Now since the urchins are now posing a security risk, the locals are pleading with the authorities to transfer them to children’s homes and rehabilitation facilities.
In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a Unicef survey revealed that there were 46,639 street people living in Kenya’s 47 counties, with 72 percent of them being men.
Street persons under 19 years of age were 15,752.
The county with the biggest number of street persons was Nairobi, which had 15,337 of them. Mombasa and Kisumu were next, with 7,529 and 2,746, respectively.
Uasin Gishu had 2,147, and Nakuru had 2,005, rounding out the top five counties.