Children begging on Sofia’s main streets, crossroads and pedestrian zones has become, unfortunately, a regular feature in the life of the city. Even more unfortunately, Sofians and visitors to the city have become used to seeing these children, some of whom are babies being carried around by women (in almost all cases Roma) claiming to be their mothers. Confronted for the first time with such a sight, many passersby reach into their pockets as a response to a child’s begging hand. However, after three or four instances, many people simply stop giving money to begging children for various reasons, many of them defensible.

Some people even, as one popular TV personality said a few years ago, start having their "pet" child beggars on whom they bestow a lev or more every morning on their way to work, at the crossroads near the National Palace of Culture (NDK), for example. Indeed, some zones and streets have become known for the children begging there. Such used to be the case at the NDK crossroads, where for years one girl "worked" among the cars waiting in front of the traffic light. Another such place is the junction of Evlogi Georgiev and Dragan Tsankov boulevards, next to the metro station where a boy on crutches used to dominate the scenery for years. The traffic lights in front of Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski have long been a popular venue for such "working children" who, other than asking for money, try to clean windscreens, with the response often being a hurling of abuse.

Occasionally, police chase begging children off the streets, because of the danger to traffic safety. Customarily, however, minutes after the police leave, the children return to their spots.

Today, while there appear to be fewer begging street children than 10 years ago, they have become part of the street scene not only in Sofia but also in other cities. Most of them are children of Roma families who have come to the big city in search of a better life and, since work is not easy to find, they turn to the streets with their children, forming a well-organised structure that covers all the main streets and crossroads. As a new feature last year, Sofia started seeing not just Roma children begging but also children of Ukrainian and Romanian origin, a report by the State Agency for Child  Protection (SACP) said in December 2009.   
  
Strategy
One reason why the problem of Sofia’s street children has been left unresolved is that there has always been some other issue which mayors and city councillors have found more important and pressing. These include the lack of kindergartens, road repairs, parking zones and refuse collection. Now, however, Yordanka Fandukova, elected Sofia mayor just a few months ago, has decided to move the Sofia street children issue up in the public agenda.

This happened in February, after city councillors adopted Fandukova’s strategy to develop social services for children and families. This strategy envisages counting the number of children begging on Sofia’s streets; no such survey has ever been done. According to the document, nine mobile teams should be operational by the middle of March.

The teams will have the task of going around the city and watching out for children begging on the streets. These mobile teams will be formed together with experts from the Interior Ministry, the SACP and the city hall. The mobile teams will also respond to citizens’ calls, Fandukova told a news conference on the issue.

The idea is that experts will look into every individual case of child beggars so that each child can be helped in the best possible way. This will include, according to the plan, a talk with the child’s parents and providing them with help, Fandukova said. The teams will look for children who have been forced to beg, and children who have escaped from children’s homes without the knowledge of their teachers.

"Depending on the child’s needs, his or her family background, these experts will direct it to the respective institutions if the child is not Sofia-born," she said. What was important, Fandukova said, was that these teams would not act as police and would not collect children off the streets and put them in institutions.

However, if a child is found to lack a stable family environment, the child will be put in a place of shelter, according to the strategy. This is why the SACP is being included in the mobile teams, as only social services have the power to place children in institutions, even if in the form of a shelter or a specially-established crisis centre.

At one of several news conferences Fandukova held on the issue, she admitted that city hall was not capable of coping with the issue on its own, and needed the help of other institutions, and most of all the NGO sector.

"We are talking here about consistent actions aimed at helping children who have been begging, and not a campaign," she said. "There might be a case when one child could be identified as a beggar more than once," Fandukova said,  insisting that the municipality did not want to act as police against children begging on the streets, but to work with them.

Whether, however, children are willing to work with the city hall is yet to be seen in the performance of the nine mobile teams.