The kids at Friends

Friends also offers an opportunity for these children to get an education. For younger children, they can attend primary school classes at Friends until they are ready to return to public school. Older students can join a vocational training class like mechanics, sewing, hairdressing or hospitality. Once they have finished studying, they are helped by the Friends team to find a good job or start their own small business.

It doesn’t always go smoothly, kids who have been drug users sometimes lapse back into drug use. Others find it hard to adjust to learning after the freedom of the streets. The Friends teams continue to support young people who are having difficulty and drop out. It is times like these when the support of a family is also so important.

Because as well as supporting children, Friends works with their families too. Often the situation of the family has led to the child ending up on the streets, so it is important that the family situation is assessed. Friends meets with families and will provide whatever support is needed to ensure that the family is able to support their children. In some cases this means helping them access medical care and HIV treatment. For others, Friends helps parents to learn a skill so that they can earn money to support their families, and so that their children don’t have to work.

Our Home Based Production project is designed to help parents of vulnerable children. For families who are having trouble making enough money, the project offers a simple solution. The parents are trained to make simple accessories and bags out of recycled materials in their homes. Friends then buys the products that they make to sell in our shops, and the money that they make is enough for them to support their own families. While parents are part of the program, they must agree that their children will attend school.

What started as a small project has grown into an international business. The creativity of the parents has led to new designs of products, which are now sold in shops around the world!

The profits from selling these products are reinvested into the program, so that more families can join. Profits also go towards providing health insurance for the families, something that is needed but often neglected.

As well as our shops, Friends run several restaurants, run by students and their teachers. They are all training restaurants, designed to give students important hands on experience in working in a real restaurant, so that they are in a better position to find employment when they graduate.

As well as providing our students with work experience, Friends businesses also play an important role in providing funds to support Friends projects. All profits from our businesses are reinvested into projects for marginalized children and their families. Our goal is to make Friends-International financially sustainable, so that we are not reliant on donors to run our projects.

Friends programs are influenced by the children and youth that we support. They tell us what they want and how they want it run. This is why Friends has been so successful and now supports 50 000 children every year.