How can ICT be Used to Improve Street Children's Plight: A Proposal for the City of Santa Fe, Argentina

Children working, eating, sleeping and growing up on the streets a.k.a. ‘Street Children’ is a problem that has long accompanied the history of development of big metropolitan centers. According to UNICEF it is almost impossible to determine the exact amount of street children but it is likely the numbers are increasing as the global population grows and urbanization continues at a rapid pace. As one way to cope with this crisis, the aim of this work is to study the utilization of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to reduce the number of street children. The idea is to evolve the concept of telecenters and telecottages, which has been largely reviewed in the literature, into Digital Knowledge Information Centers (DKICs) tailored to street children’s need. The objective is to use ICT tools to offer content and activities that can capture their attention thus attracting them out of the streets while at the same time improve their literacy, e-literacy and provide useful skills to reduce their marginality and improve a future reinsertion in the society. In practice, every city in the world has some street children but, for the sake of this work, the city of Santa Fe in Argentina was chosen because it already has structures such as ‘Centers for Family Action’ scattered in the poorest neighborhoods that can be easily turned into successful DKICs.