Gulu is a place accustomed to hardship. For some three decades, between the late 1980s and early 2000s, the city was the epicenter of an uprising against the government mounted by the Lord’s Resistance Army, notorious for forcibly recruiting some 20,000 child soldiers. A grim parade of boys and girls would flood into the city each night and sleep under its market stalls and in church yards, hoping to avoid capture by the rebels, before returning to their villages at dawn.

Today, the children are often escaping family abuse or neglect, hoping to make it on their own. Mr. Dong, who asked to use a pseudonym, fled to the streets when he was six years old. His mother had died giving birth to him, and the women his father brought home with him were physically and emotionally abusive.

Without parents to look out for him, he fell in with other children for safety. “I got a family outside of my family,” he says. They helped each other find food; they also offered some protection in a community that viewed them as troublemakers, and from police officers quick to make arrests.

“There’s this general feeling among people that those who live on the streets are bad people and everything that is wrong that is happening in our society is done by some of them,” explains Mr. Ojok, the Hashtag Gulu director, of the stigma surrounding homeless children.