Support and Love Via Education (S.A.L.V.E.) International

 We believe that no young person should have to live or work on the streets.

We believe that young people who have lived and worked on the streets deserve the chance to fulfil their potential.

We believe that young people on the streets should have trustworthy, supportive adults around them.

We offer a holistic and individualised range of programmes that enable us to build strong trusting relationships with children living on the streets of Jinja so that we are able to help them move off the streets and successfully settle back home with their families. Our Street Outreach Team uses a combination of street walks, sports sessions and our Drop in Centre to get to know the children living on the streets. Many of the children on the street have been mistreated by the adults in their lives who were meant to look after them, and therefore find it very difficult to trust new adults. We want to show them that there are adults out there who care for them and who they can trust. Once we know a child well enough and they feel able to trust us, we can plan together with them, about how we can help them successfully leave the streets. In most cases, a child may be referred to our Halfway Home, where they can stay temporarily as they adjust to life away from the streets, access further counselling and prepare to return to their families. In other cases, children prefer to be home traced directly from the streets. Our programme is individually adapted for every child to give them the best possible chance of success. When a child is ready to be home traced, one of our street outreach workers goes with the child for a home tracing visit, and in most cases, they are able to resettle a child back within their extended family. In 2018, we have resettled 68 children back with their families. Of these children, 87% were still happily settled at home; when we carried out follow up visits. For those few who can’t be resettled immediately, they are able to stay at our Halfway Homes whilst we look for alternative relatives and may be enrolled into school whilst we do so. Once resettled, we assess the family situation to see if there is need for educational support from S.A.L.V.E. and whether the family would benefit from our business empowerment programme, where we offer small business training and start up packages to help the family increase their income and support their child at home. We currently support 76 children in our educational sponsorship programme and have supported 89 families to begin their own small businesses. We are also members of street child bodies such as The Consortium for Street Children, which challenge discrimination against homeless young people. We have also run training and action days in Uganda for members of the local community, including local schools and the local police, who hold negative views of children on the streets. In November 2015, S.A.L.V.E. won the won the British National Council for Voluntary Organisation’s Winifred Tumin Award for Good Governance. We are committed to excellent governance so as to deliver the maximum impact possible. Watch our award winning video here to see our work in action: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6ikf2HE4yY Please look at our Annual Reports and our website for more details about our current work, future plans and where we get our funding from.