OVC Category

Risks

Opportunities

All OVC

- New transport routes expose all children to multiple new risks, which are described more in detail below.

- New roads, bridges, and railways help improve OVC’s access to schools and health facilities in communities that were once isolated.

- The introduction of IMTs (intermediary means of transport) such as animal carts for transporting goods, water, people etc. serve to decrease the time that children, especially girls, spend transporting water and other items for the household, thus freeing them up to pursue their studies.

Street Children

- A new road or railway station usually gives rise to an army of street vendors of food, drink, cigarettes, and other essentials required by construction workers and, later on, by passing traffic. Many of these vendors are children (on the street) and some of them may eventually transition into sleeping in the street (turn into children of the street – see definitions section).

- The new transport route also gives children and their families more access to cities. This may lead some families or children to migrate to nearby cities, where many of them end up living in the street due to a lack of alternatives.

- A new transport route creates employment opportunities for adults, which may give them the revenue they need to keep their children in school, instead of working in the street.

HIV/AIDS affected children

- Construction workers and later truckers who use newly built roads may be infected with HIV and may engage in unprotected sex with local adults or children, thus cause parents to die and infection among children.

- New transport routes improve communication and may increase a community’s access to information about how to prevent HIV/AIDS, protecting parents and young people. In several countries, HIV/AIDS activities take place in the rail stations and bus stations that are built along these new routes.

- These routes also improve access to HIV/AIDS counseling and treatment services, where available, thus helping to extend the lives of infected parents or preventing mother to child transmission.

Children in the Worst Forms of Child Labor

- Contractors in the transport sector need large numbers of cheap unskilled laborers. Some may hire under-aged children to do some of this heavy work.

- Construction workers and truckers create a demand for sexual services. This may result in an increase in the number of child prostitutes as well as the most vulnerable children being forced to have sex against their will.

- Road and other transport projects create employment opportunities for adults in local communities, both during construction and often later on from the new economic activity stimulated by the new transport routes. This may decrease pressure on parents to send their children out to earn an income, in activities that may be harmful to them. Labor-based programs sometimes target vulnerable households and individuals when recruiting workers. These may include single-parent or low-income households, ex-combatants, etc.

Children in Post-Conflict Situations

- The process of building a new road or railway, may dislodge unexploded ordinance, causing it to explode unexpectedly, which may put passing children at risk.

- During the road construction process, traffic may be temporarily re-routed to another route, which may have undetected mines that could harm a child.

- As roads are reconstructed in a post-conflict situation, the risk that a child will step on a mine in the roadway is reduced.

- Large infrastructure projects create employment opportunities for older children formerly associated with armed conflict, who do not wish to enroll in school.

Children living with a disability

- All children are at risk of injury and disability from passing traffic

- New transport systems may improve access for disabled people to health and education services as well as to specialized therapy.

- New paved roads and sidewalks may make it easier for wheelchair bound children to be mobile. (In the African context the wheel chair consists of a hand cranked tricycles.) New roads may improve access for all children and pregnant mothers to preventive health care services, thus decreasing birth defects and preventable childhood diseases such as polio.