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Tatiana now sleeps in dignity in a corner of Nairobi's Langata Cemetery. She is the latest tenant of the city's public graveyard from the Mathare slums. She was just 17 months old.

Tatiana was born with a heart defect to Damaris Asunta, a 26-year-old jobless single mother of two. When her health problem was diagnosed at Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital, doctors referred the baby to Kenyatta National Hospital.

"They asked for Sh1,850 to see a doctor but I didn't have the money," Asunta said.

She returned to Mathare with the sick child, who was getting sicker. Again, she was taken to Mama Lucy, where Tatiana was diagnosed with severe pneumonia in addition to her heart problem. She struggled to breathe.

The doctors called KNH to book emergency admission but the beds were full. No room for a dying street girl. Tatiana slipped away on January 30.

Asunta didn’t have the money to bury her daughter and sought help from Zero Street Child Foundation, a community-based organisation in Mathare. A charity paid Tatiana’s hospital bill, burial charges, donated a coffin and provided transport.

Tatiana is the tenth member of a Mathare street family from Mathare to be buried at Langata in two weeks.

On the day before she died, the foundation with the support of well-wishers had buried nine homeless people there. At the time of this writing, nine more bodies were lying at Mama Lucy and Nairobi Funeral Home (formerly City Mortuary), the organisation said.

Ordinarily when a person dies, family and friends form funeral committees, raise funds, organise elaborate dignified funerals and wakes for their loved ones and friends.

But who buries homeless street people?Nobody.

After months in the mortuary, the bodies are buried by the government in public cemeteries.

Peter Ndiboe doesn’t want to be treated like trash. It is undignified.

Peter, as everyone calls him in Mathare, is a former street boy and the founder of Zero Street Child Foundation. In his office, he keeps a fat file of records of people whose funerals he has organised over the years.

He began arranging the mass burial of the nine bodies in December. He didn’t have the cash because his organisation has no regular sponsors, so he made calls, sent WhatsApp texts, made direct appeals for support to politicians and government officials for help.

No one helped.

“Our MCA told me to my face that he doesn’t deal with chokoras [homeless people],” Peter told the Star.

“I contacted the CEO of the Street Families Rehabilitation Trust Fund about funerals for these people but she did not respond.”

He sought help from Nairobi governor aspirant Agnes Kagure. Her foundation offered to finance the funerals. “We dug the graves ourselves at Lang’ata Cemetery,” Peter said.

He showed the Star where some of the bodies were collected in Mathare. The causes of the deaths include hunger, cold, beatings by police or city inspectors, fights among themselves and untreated illnesses like Tatiana’s.

“Many of them also die of drug [abuse] and cheap alcohol. One died by suicide after he had been threatened three times by the police. He lived on the street, which was not his fault,” Peter said.

The government appeared to think there was something fishy about the deaths. On February 5, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations detectives summoned Peter to explain his involvement in the funerals. He was interrogated and let go. That is the only contact he has had with the government about the funerals.

The Star visited the offices of the Street Families Rehabilitation Fund to inquire about its programmes. Reporters were asked to leave questions for acting CEO Caroline Towett. She has not responded.

“I don’t know what they do because the numbers of street families keep rising,” Peter said. “Many of those who come from rural areas first land here at Mlango Kubwa before they start moving out to the other areas. When they are chased away from the CBD, where are they supposed to go?”

They live in shacks in Mathare or any available space.

“Whenever we ask for funds for rescue and rehabilitation, we don’t get any. I have sent many proposals [to the SFRTF] but received nothing,” Peter said.

The fund was established in 2003 by the administration of then President Mwai Kibaki “to spearhead the government’s response to the street families phenomenon and the associated problems, realising its vision of making Kenya free of street families.”

Chaired by former Othaya MP Mary Wambui, the fund is supposed to coordinate capacity development, resource mobilisation and monitoring programmes in prevention, rescue, rehabilitation, reintegration and resocialisation of street families.

For its first 20 years, SFRTF did not have a policy, until 2023. It is not clear what the fund has achieved.

Peter Mueke works with street families in Kamukunji. His organisation, Street Changers, has failed to get financial support from the SFRTF, despite sending several proposals.

Mueke said big organisations that run rescue and rehabilitation centres benefit from the fund while the small ones are ignored.

The Star was unable to verify this claim because the SFRTF failed to provide information.

Activist and former street boy Kennedy Chindi said demolitions and evictions by the government and private developers have pushed more people into the streets.

“Families used to pay rent of around Sh2,000 but when those houses were demolished, they could only find accommodation in rentals for about Sh7,000, which they could not afford,” he said.

“Many marriages broke up and the children were left on their own and headed to the streets.”

Due to government interventions, the population of street families has dropped from 46,936 in 2018 to 18,049 last year.

Children ServicesCabinet SecretaryHannah Cheptumo said the government is committed to serving street families “with compassion, care and respect both in life and in death”.

In a statement on February 2, following the burials in Lang’ata, the CS said the bodies “had been held in mortuaries for several months in 2025 and well-wishers and community-based organisations facilitated the burials. The Ministry for Gender, Culture and Children Services was not informed of these developments prior to the burials.”

Peter, however, showed the Star a message he sent to SFRTF’s acting CEO Towett on January 18, requesting support for the funerals. She did not reply.

“At this stage, no official postmortem reports or verified medical documentation have been availed to confirm the identities, causes of death or circumstances surrounding the hospitalisation and demise of the deceased,” CS Cheptumo said.

All the bodies, however, were formally released by Mama Lucy hospital and the Nairobi Funeral Home with proper documentation.

The CS cited claimed reduction in the number of street families by almost 29,000.

She said, “This progress has been achieved through coordinated rescue, rehabilitation, reintegration, psychosocial support, education, and economic empowerment programmes implemented in collaboration with county governments, civil society organisations and development partners.”

But Undugu Society, a well-established organisation dealing with street children, expressed doubt that the population is declining.

Executive director Eric Mukoya detailed Undugu’s work across the country and said, “The numbers are bigger than that. The government’s intervention is inadequate as the problems are systemic.”

“We need targeted programmes that deal with the challenges of livelihood that make these people remain in the streets.”

The Star visited the Department of Social Services of Nairobi City county to inquire about their programmes for street families but were told the chief officer was out of office. We left our questions and contacts as requested. We have not received a response.

Nairobi governor aspirant Kagure, who has sponsored funerals for Mathare homeless persons, said the biggest failure is treating street families as a nuisance rather than as citizens deserving protection and opportunity.

“We have relied on reactive approaches that include crackdowns, displacement, or charity from well-wishers like myself, rather than structured, humane systems that go into the root of the problem,” Kagure said.

“There is poor coordination between health services, social protection, housing and rehabilitation. Nairobi residents, too, have grown comfortable looking away, instead of demanding action and accountability.”

If elected governor next year, she would prioritise a coordinated data-driven approach. “That means proper mapping of street families, access to immediate healthcare and nutrition, rehabilitation programmes, transitional shelters, skills-based training and solid pathways back into society.”

She said she would pick up from where former Local Government Minister Karisa Maitha left off and establish a rehabilitation hub since the land is already available in Ruai.

“Most importantly, I would work with civil society, faith groups, community leaders and private organisations who already understand these realities, instead of sidelining them.”

Until such effective measures are taken, Kenya’s thousands of homeless street families will continue living a wretched life of cold, hunger, disease and lack of basic rights, leading to avoidable deaths like that of little Titiana.