Sylvain Shomba Kinyamba’s scientific contributions

The inhabitants of Kinshasa (Kinois) in general and the street children (bashege) in particular, exist in a kind of half-dead (or half-living) state. The social, political, economic and cultural circumstances that characterise the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) manifest themselves in daily life in the form of permanent and structural exclusion, discrimination, humiliationand poverty. All this is not to say that the Kinois and the bashege remain entirely passive in this regard, or that they make no attempt to assert control over their lives. In this article, we will argue that they transform themselves into active agents who exercise agency – that is, exert deliberate control over their lives. We therefore opt for the term human agency instead of coping or coping strategies in this text.