Lina thought that the streets of Harare were paved with gold, so it was there that she begged the bus driver to take her when her parents died leaving her an orphan in Zimbabwe's destitute rural west.

Princess came to the city after she was thrown out by the new wife her stepfather took after her own mother died from tuberculosis.

Precious came looking for an aunt she had heard was living here, peddling vegetables on the streets for a meagre living.

Lina, then 14, had no money for her fare, so the driver took her virginity as payment. Princess, then 13, sold hers for a loaf of bread after the police stole the peanuts she was selling and chased her off the streets. Precious had already had hers taken from her by a cousin who ambushed her on her way to school and raped her. So she was no longer a virgin when, at 14, she followed the others into prostitution, selling herself to strangers on the streets of Harare merely to survive.

“They are the chaff that has blown in here,” said the church worker who took The Times to meet the girls in the slums of Harare. “Nobody cares about them at all.”

The story of the children peddling their bodies for pennies is the story of Zimbabwe's rural poor. Ground down into a state of dependent impoverishment, the collapse of the country's rural economy has left them more desperate than ever. The Aids crisis, and the creaking health system it has overwhelmed, has left hundreds of thousands of children orphans, struggling to fend for themselves. As once-prime farmland fell back into bush, thousands picked up their few belongings and headed for the cities in search of a better life.

Lina came to the slums from far-flung Matabeleland, where President Mugabe sent his troops in the early Eighties to put down opponents, wiping out entire villages. It has been punished for its opposition ever since.

“I came to Harare because I thought people were rich here,” she said. But at the bus station people told her to go to the slums of Mbare, where “people like me” slept on the streets. She saw people hawking drinks, vegetables and nuts and thought she would do that too. But she had no money to start with and there was none to be earned begging. “That's when one of the other girls taught me to stand on the streets.”

Princess fared better, finding a vendor willing to employ her selling her vegetables in the street. But then came Mr Mugabe's social project, Operation Murambatsvina, or “Clean Up Trash”, a brutal push to clear the streets of peddlers and squatters and deny his opposition urban support. More than 600,000 people were made homeless in the purge.

The clear-up deprived Princess of her legitimate if meagre livelihood, forcing her to more desperate measures. “The police chased us and beat us if they found us selling,” she said. “And then they would steal what we had to sell.” In debt to her supplier, she had only one option. “The last thing I had to sell was myself.”

That was two years ago and the money she got for her first client could buy her a loaf of bread. Now it can barely do that. Sex with one of Mbare's street girls costs Z$10 million (25p) — when the customers actually pay. “I'll have about four or five a day,” Princess said. “Out of that, maybe two will pay.” The police do not chase her any more, but they still steal, demanding sex in return for leaving her alone.

Amine, one of the girls who works the streets with Princess, showed a fresh scar on her hand where a customer had stabbed her, forcing her to drop the notes that he had just paid her.

Precious, a tiny 16-year-old, stunning beneath the grime, sees as many as ten men a day, and mostly they pay. But often when she wakes up in the morning, beneath the plastic sheeting she uses for shelter, she finds her money has vanished, stolen by a client or a jealous friend.

“My money is disappearing,” she said. “I am doing this for nothing at all. Sometimes I wake in the morning and I have nothing, not even a piece of soap to wash, and my belly is sore from no food.” Along with the hunger, fear stalks the girls. Zimbabwe's HIV rate runs at 15 per cent and few of the men that buy their services wear condoms. “Sometimes they threaten you and say 'If you try to make me wear a condom I'll beat you',” said Treatmon, who came to Harare to work on the streets a year ago when she was orphaned at 13.

“To begin with I was happy to do it because I had money and I could eat. But now I see girls dying of Aids and so I expect to die with Aids too.”

Elections this weekend herald a momentous moment in Zimbabwe's history, holding out the possibility of an end to the three decades of Mr Mugabe's rule that have driven these children to the streets — and the country to the brink. It remains to be seen if having stolen the girls' past Mr Mugabe will also rob them of their future.

His machinery is in place to steal the vote as before, but this time even that may not be enough to mask the groundswell of discontent. The chance of change has gilded the elections with mythic status, a panacea for ills that even a new president cannot hope to change.

It is two years since Precious went back to Lower Gwelo: the cousin who raped her is out of jail and swearing vengeance, and she is too afraid to return. “I miss my granny,” she said. “Maybe after elections things will be more stable and I can go home.”

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