Yogyakarta – Yulianti Safitri, 19, moved from one street to another across Sumatra and Java for six years until she ended up in this Indonesian royal city.

Her parents died when she was eight years old and her uncle, who was supposed to take care of the girl, raped her when she was 10, forcing her to leave the home in Padang, West Sumatra, and take to the streets. But she said that on the street she was subject to yet more sexual assaults.

It was a policeman who found her last year in Yogyakarta's famed Malioboro street and took her to a shelter for girl street children in Sleman, which is managed by the now-defunct social ministry.

"Someone poisoned my father and shocked by his death, my mother suddenly died of a heart attack," the weeping Safitri told AFP. "I moved from one place to another. At one time I also worked as a housemaid," she said. "I'm happy now here. I have people I can call parents, who take care of and educate me," she added.

Yulianti is one of 500 female street children in Yogyakarta who will benefit from one million US dollars in assistance from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which on Wednesday launched the Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction. If successful, the Yogyakarta pilot project under the Japan Fund, which has resources of 90 million dollars and is financed by the Japanese government, will be replicated in other cities.

The project, the first to address Indonesia's female street children, is aimed at helping victims of sexual abuse and child prostitution in Yogyakarta by providing rehabilitation and medical services.

The number of street children here has doubled since the Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia in mid-1997, which was marked by the plunge of the rupiah. The ADB said a 1999 survey of 12 cities in Indonesia found that girls make up 20 percent of the country's estimated 170,000 street children. The survey also found that the average age of female street children is between 4 and 18 years old. They are all at risk of sexual abuse.

"We will provide prenatal and postnatal care for pregnant girls and young mothers," said Kur Hardjanti, ADB's task manager for the project. "We will also treat girls with sexually-transmitted infections. In addition, we will train social workers to deal with female street children and organize public information campaigns against child prostitution," Hardjanti added.

However Yogyakarta governor Sultan Hamengkubuwono, while expressing his support for the project, said he feared that the scheme would attract even more street children to the tiny province.

"Poor children from outside Yogyakarta may come here in the hope of getting shelter. This will create an impression that the program is a failure because people then will ask why there are more street children despite the project," he told reporters at his office after meeting ADB officials. The governor said he suspected a large organization might be behind the street children problem.

Ulun Nuha, a social worker at the Ghifari shelter for famale street children in Yogyakarta, said economic problems were not the only reason that children fled onto the streets. "Many left their homes because they have conflicts with their families, like one of the girls who is under our care. She refused to marry a man whom her parents had chosen for her," he told AFP.

He said most of the street children, many of whom make a living by busking, engaged in pre-marital sex, making them susceptible to sexually-transmitted deseases and pregnancy. "Yogyakarta is heaven for street kids because they consider it more friendly than other cities. Seventy percent of street kids here come from other areas in Indonesia," he said.

Nuha said one of his shelter's projects, in addition to providing vocational training and couselling, is to arrange marriages for those who have lived together with their partners, so they can lead a normal life. "The marriage bond is something we Indonesians cherish. By having legitimate relationships we hope that they will be accepted by the society," he said.

But Ghifari's efforts are not always successful. "It takes long and tedious effort to persuade them to go back to their families. Even if they are willing, many parents are still reluctant to accept them," he said.