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As the forgotten victims of violence and famine in Somalia, street children in Mogadishu are subject to a multitude of degradations, such as disease, drug use and sexual violence -- problems activists say threaten social stability.

While there are no official statistics on the number of street children, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and local aid agencies estimated in 2008 that at least 5,000 children live on Mogadishu's streets.

"It seems their numbers grow day after day," said Mohamed Nur Salad of the Child Protection Network, an advocacy group for children. "There are currently thousands of children between the ages of seven and 16 who live on the streets of Mogadishu, most of whom are boys."

"Many of these children live in miserable conditions, permanently or semi-permanently taking shelter on the street and in abandoned buildings," he told Sabahi. "Many use drugs, which has created a security and social threat."

To provide for their daily needs, many street children perform menial jobs such as shoe shining and car washing, while others collect garbage or qat remnants to sell back to addicts.

Salad said street children are exposed to psychological and physical aggression, mistreatment, and exploitation when they sleep on the streets at night. "But even more dangerous is the fact that on the streets, these children become easy prey for radical groups that recruit them for terrorist activity," he said.

Salad called on the government and non-governmental organisations active in children's rights to take immediate steps to solve this problem before it escalates.

Poverty and broken families force children into the streets

"Constant displacement, homelessness, poverty and family disintegration are among the main and direct factors that have forced children to live on the streets over the past few years," said Abdisamad Abdullahi, a children's rights activist at Kalmo, a non-profit organisation based in Mogadishu.

He said many orphans are forced to live on the streets. Poverty and broken families also play a major role in making the streets the "last resort and a logical alternative for children".

"When these children grow up on the streets, they are more likely to join criminal gangs or become victims of drug dealing," he said, adding that they must be integrated into society to prevent this fate.

Mohamed Deeq Hassan, 14, said he started living on the street after losing both his parents five years ago.

"I lost my parents when I was nine years old and there was no one to take care of me so I started living on the streets," he told Sabahi. "Life on the streets is very cruel but I cannot find any other place to live."

Hassan said he sniffs glue for its brief relief from his suffering. "When I sniff glue I can forget for a while the harsh conditions in which I live and I feel a kind of imaginary happiness," he said. "I can imagine I am on the moon and I sometimes dream of being in Europe or America and I forget all the problems I have in Mogadishu."

The first shelter for street children

To ease the suffering of street children, Mogadishu-based Social Development Organisation, a religious group that focuses on providing support and services to displaced Somalis, has opened the first centre in Mogadishu to help street children.

Mawahib Centre houses around 80 street children, most of whom are orphans between seven and 14 years old, and provides them with medical care, food, clothing and education, according to the centre's director Omar Ahmed.

"When we noticed that the problem was getting worse, we decided to open a centre to shelter and rehabilitate street children," said director Omar Ahmed. "This is a step to lessen the impact of being homeless and lost for these children."

"All Somalis -- both the people and the government -- have to work towards saving the lives and futures of these children who can be found throughout the streets of Mogadishu," he told Sabahi. "We are all responsible and we have to fulfil our religious and national duty to reintegrate them into society and turn them into a positive human force instead of a ticking bomb that could go off at any moment."

"If these children are rehabilitated, they will be the leaders of the future," he said. "But if we leave them in the streets, we will have a lost generation of Somali people."