Using Social Indicators in Assessing Factors and Numbers of Street Children in the World

Many reports rely on the estimate that there are anywhere from 150 to 100 million street children in the world, although this figure has virtually no basis in empirical evidence. In this article, all the available data on the number of street children and relevant social indicators for 184 countries were gathered and statistically processed in order to produce a more reliable estimate. Aptekar (Cross-Cultural Research 28(3): 195–224, 1994) assumption on common denominators of countries with a high presence of street children was used as a starting point. The results show that there is about 10 to 15 million street children in the world. Two directions for future development are outlined: firstly, a more reliable and unified inductive approach for estimating the number of street children in individual countries is needed along with an appropriate methodological model and secondly, there is a need to create a global estimate of the number of all children living in the streets, which might be achieved by a similar methodological approach to the one used in this article.