guest column:Lorraine van Blerk, Janine Hunter & Wayne Shand THE lockdown imposed to curb the spread of the new coronavirus has had drastic effects on children and young people who live on the streets of many African cities. Their lives, even in “normal” times, are marked by ongoing hardship and tenacity. We work on a project called “Growing up on the Streets” in three African cities: Accra, Ghana; Bukavu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Harare, Zimbabwe. The aim is to provide insights into their daily lives — and their struggles and coping strategies — so that policies can be better informed and, ultimately, transform their lives. In Harare, these young people are spread across the city, sharing space in alleyways, market places, low-income settlements, or on wasteland. Precise numbers are difficult to determine, but in Harare alone across three years of “Growing up on the Streets”, 246 street children and youth have been involved. We wanted to see how they’re coping under Harare’s COVID-19 lockdown. On March 30, 2020, the Zimbabwean government announced a lockdown for 21 days to curb the spread of the virus. Most shops were closed and informal trading was banned, roadblocks were placed outside central Harare. This lockdown was extended indefinitely in May and a national curfew is still in place. The lockdown measures were inevitably going to impact on these young people, and so in June we asked them to participate in creating a “story map” titled In the Shadow of a Pandemic: Harare’s Street Youth Experience COVID-19. Story maps are maps with text, images, and multimedia content. They’re a powerful story-telling tool. Through their story map, we saw how the lockdown appears to have been imposed with little thought of how the poor majority would survive — 63% of Zimbabweans live below the poverty line. Street children and youth are among the most deprived; their lack of identity documents and an address excludes them from access to what safety nets exist, for example in the form of welfare or social protection programmes, which almost always target households. Measures moving forward must take their struggle to survive into account. Eyes on the ground We worked with local non-governmental organisation Street Empowerment Trust, which facilitated all the work on the ground. The project involved 24 young people, six of whom captured their stories through photographs, short films or sound recordings using borrowed phones. The young people highlighted how they avoided arrest, found food and supported themselves when the informal economy was shut down. Prior to lockdown in late March, street children between the ages of 10 and 16 were rounded up and placed in children’s homes. The aim was to remove young people from the city centre, designated a high-risk area for COVID-19 transmission. Roundups have been used by the authorities in the past. While intended as a protection measure, many ran away due to previous experiences of confinement — residential care facilities often lack the bare minimum of basic services. As