Social Enterprises: A vocational entrepreneurship framework for street youth

It is estimated that there are 100 million ¿street children¿ in the world. Street children typically live independent of families in makeshift living arrangements, and survive on little but their wits and the camaraderie of small gangs. To better understand the lives of street children, we conducted 150 days of ethnographic investigations in and around Calcutta, with an emphasis on street children who live in train stations. Our hope was to understand their typical challenges, and to see whether they could be addressed with information and communication technology. Among other things, this study led to the identification of an unreported knowledge gap among the children. Namely because their world is limited to geographical "islands" within a couple-block radius of train stations, they were entirely unaware of the of micro-entrepreneurial possibilities beyond their islands. In the second half of this paper, we describe a preliminary trial with an NGO to expose street children to entrepreneurial possibilities using mediated video instruction. Such a system shows promise, if combined with ongoing social support: some children were both quick to understand and try their hand at new professions, and were to continue their professions for at least two months with ongoing NGO support.