With the breakdown of communist rule in Mongolia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the first generation of street children was born. An effect of the abrupt transition to a market economy was unemployment, since numbers of state owned businesses were forced to shut down. For many families this meant the beginning of a social deroute of alcoholism, violence and abuse. The children of these families have largely been left to their own devices because of the lack of a proper social safety net.

The police estimate that more than one thousand children live in the streets of Ulan Bator but nobody knows the real number . In the coldest months of the year when temperatures drop as low as -45?c degrees, many street children survive by  staying in the channels of the district heating system underground.