education, medical care, counselling, micro-credit and other relevant services. These groups too, often lack the human and financial resources to adequately respond to the problem. Many orphans are forced to live on the streets or under exploitative conditions of labour and sexual abuse. Many of them live in child-headed households where they fend for themselves and support their younger siblings. Some of these children are infected with HIV either through mother-to-child transmission or through defilement. It is estimated that there are about 10,000 street children in Uganda (OVC Policy, 2005) No. of Orpans Number of Orphans in Primary Schools 1,500,000 Male 1,000,000 Female 500,000 Total 0 2001 2002 2003 2004 Years The Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development together with other stakeholders formulated the Orphans and other Vulnerable Children (OVC) Policy and National Strategic Programme Plan of Interventions to guide stakeholders in providing for and caring for these disadvantaged children. The focus of the policy is on the most vulnerable children who are without families and who may not necessarily be orphans, with the intention of re-integrating them back into the family. Through the programme attention will also be placed on needy households of adults and children that may or may not contain an orphan, with the intention of mitigating the impact of vulnerability in Uganda‟s current context of HIV/AIDS, poverty, gender, among others. 7.2.2 Establishment of A Street Children’s Desk at the MGLSD This was established to co-ordinate activities of all NGOs active in working with and for children living on the street. Guidelines for practitioners working with street children in Uganda has been developed whose goals are to: reduce physical, emotional and psychological abuse of children living on the street; provide temporal, qualitative and developmentally-oriented care for children on the street that leads to improvement in the quality of their lives; encourage children living on the street; provide alternative self-support activities that empower them to live an independent and productive life and encourage vocational skills training so that they can use these skills to earn a living. The guidelines further aim at making the police more responsive to the plight of children living on the street and in the process develop child-friendly approaches to handling them and developing a good working relationship between street workers. These measures will improve the efficiency and quality of services rendered by different stakeholders to street children in Uganda. Government has come up with a training manual for those who work with children living on the street. The manual aims at standardizing services and providing knowledge and skills for handling of these children. 22