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>View discussions about this entry Country: Uganda
Organization: RETRAK
Year the initative began (yyyy) 1997
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Project URL: http://www.retrak.org
Positioning in the Mosaic of solutions
Describe your program or new idea in one sentence. Street boys in Uganda are offered a comprehensive set of services designed to enable them to realize their potential and discover their worth.
What makes your initiative uniquely positioned to create change in your community? RETRAK is a holistic, child-centered, professional social work organization, wrapped up in a package that is universally appealing but all too rare for street children: the opportunity to play. Boys and young men living on the mean streets of Kampala are reluctant to show vulnerability by asking for help, but the universal appeal of soccer breaks the ice and draws them into the program.
A street boy in Africa may occasionally find himself on the receiving end of short-term relief services, but is seldom offered a wide-ranging set of services designed to treat the whole child. RETRAK focuses on all aspects of a boy’s development: physical, psychological, spiritual, social, cultural and educational. The staff works to build a foundation of trust and treats each child as a unique individual. RETRAK also believes that the best place for a child to grow and develop is with a family, and aims to help a boy reintegrate into the community, whether through reconciliation with relatives or foster care. Describe how you organize and carry out your work? Retrak's flagship project is the Tigers Club Project, in Kampala, Uganda. The three pillars of the project are:
Relationship Building - meeting immediate needs with sports, feeding and medical programs. Rehabilitation - counseling and learning programs and a halfway home/farm enable us to get to know the individual boy and tailor a program to his specific needs. Reintegration - returning the boy to the community through, depending on age and circumstances, resettlement, fostering, secondary schooling, vocational training or micro-enterprise programs. What is your plan to scale and expand your innovation into your community and beyond? RETRAK has long had the vision to extend the impact of the Tigers Club Project beyond Uganda, and to use the experience and lessons learned in Kampala to reach out to children in other African cities. We don’t just believe that the model can be successfully replicated; we know that it can... because it has already been achieved in two other cities in Africa.
In June of 2007, after extensive market analysis and consultations with other local organizations working with street children, RETRAK Ethiopia opened its doors in the capital city of Addis Ababa. RETRAK also recently joined forces with a partner project, the Caleb Project, in Eldoret, Kenya. In both cases, the programs retain RETRAK’s model of excellence in the holistic care of street children, yet are tailored to be locally relevant. RETRAK is currently exploring the possibilities of extending their work to Kigali, Rwanda, and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. What other resources, institutional, or policy needs would be necessary to help sustain and scale up your idea? RETRAK needs a strong national staff team and a steady stream of income to sustain and scale up our work.
RETRAK’s program is labor-intensive, giving each young man who walks through our doors the individual attention that he needs to turn his life around. This is a relatively costly undertaking, but one that works in the long run like no short-term relief program can. This requires a team of well-trained, professional Ugandan nationals. In addition to staff salaries, we need funding for food and medical supplies, and to pay for the cost of a vehicle to transport the boys not only to soccer matches, but to their home villages for resettlement. We would like to expand our micro-enterprise program for the older boys to start their own small businesses, and to increase the number of young men who receive vocational training. Describe your impact in one sentence, commenting on both the individual and community levels. Street boys in Africa break away from street life, are welcomed back into the community and become productive members of society.
What impact has your work achieved to date? For over 10 years, RETRAK has helped hundreds of young men overcome their past and have hope for the future. Through our programs, former street children have been able to turn their lives around and reunite with their families, obtain an education, earn a living, and embrace life once again.
RETRAK works directly with homeless boys between 7 and 20 years of age, with the goal of not just returning them to the community, but enabling them to overcome the past and have hope for the future. We have remained faithful to this target group over the years because there are ten times more street boys than girls in Kampala, yet the number of NGOs working with street boys is proportionally far fewer, and older boys who have spent longer on the streets are often perceived as harder to work with and often not targeted by projects.
What measure do you use to gauge your impact and why? The Tigers Club project seeks to deal with each child on a case-by-case basis, giving value to each individual, his character and personal circumstances. Consequently, the most effective way of measuring the impact of our programs to date has been qualitative feedback from the children themselves as well as from social workers, educators, the project nurse, other project staff and community members coming into contact with the former street boys.
How is your initiative currently being financed and how would you finance further expansion and/or replication? RETRAK began as a grassroots organization funded for the first few years of its operation mostly by individual donors, schools and churches. Wishing to sustain and scale-up our programs, RETRAK’s management team recognized the need for a long-term fundraising strategy. The result is the employment of two part-time trust fundraisers, one in the UK and one in Kenya, along with the volunteer services of a US Support Coordinator. This investment has begun to pay off, and other sources of funds include the McKnight Foundation, the William Cooper Proctor Foundation, l'Association des Femmes D'Europe and the Consortium for Street Children.
Provide information on your current finances and organization: RETRAK is a registered NGO in Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya, and a registered charity in the UK. We were recently incorporated in the US and 501©(3) (nonprofit) status is pending. Oversight is performed by an international Board of Trustees, made up of members from the US, UK, and Belgium. A financial audit is performed annually.
RETRAK believes in building and empowering strong teams of national staff to lead and manage the work, and the Tigers Club Project in Uganda is made up entirely of Ugandan nationals. RETRAK, has annual revenue of $535,182, which is used to support not only the Tigers Club Project, but also projects in Ethiopia and Kenya as well as an administrative office in the UK. The Tigers Club Project’s annual budget is $365,470. RETRAK has 33 full-time staff, 4 part-time staff and approximately 30 volunteers. Who are your potential partners and allies? Our closest allies are the young men themselves, who are involved in every step of their transformation. Additionally, RETRAK seeks to work in partnership with like-minded organizations and local governments to avoid duplication of effort and to develop models of best practice. Locally, RETRAK’s founder and CEO, Andy Williams, founded Kampala’s Inter-NGO Forum for cooperation and information exchange between street child organizations. Globally, Andy is a founding member of 180 Degree Alliance, which brings together street child projects from all over the world.
Who are your potential investors? Strong long-term relationships have been built with many individuals and churches that are faithfully supporting RETRAK’s work. However, as RETRAK expands, new avenues of funding must be pursued in order to fulfill our goals. Additional funding from government sources -- in the US, UK, Europe and Africa -- as well as corporate and charitable foundations is being explored by our management team.
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story. RETRAK has its roots in a pick-up soccer team of street children in Kampala, Uganda. In October 1994, the Tigers Football Club was formed as a means of building relationships with the growing number of children living on the streets of Kampala. In 1996, Andy Williams arrived in Kampala and began the process of transforming the team into the Tigers Club Project. It soon grew into a well-respected professional social work program -- a comprehensive program that strives to meet the physical, psychological, spiritual, social, cultural and educational needs of every homeless child that enters the program. It became a registered NGO and UK charity in 1997. In 2005, The Tigers Club Project became the flagship project of a new umbrella organization called RETRAK, with its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. In addition to the Tigers Club Project in Kampala, RETRAK has opened a second project for street children in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and a partner project in Eldoret, Kenya.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material. Andy Williams is the founder and CEO of RETRAK. He arrived in Kampala in 1996 to bring to life his idea of turning soccer into a lifeboat for boys floundering on the streets. Prior to this venture, Andy’s service to children began with work among young heroin addicts in Glasgow, Scotland, followed by work with young people in Theatre in Education in the UK and as the director of a youth work program in Brussels, Belgium.
Contact Information:
Joan Townsend
US Support Coordinator RETRAK (NGO) townsendsindc@hotmail.com 4980 Quebec Street, NW Washington, DC 20016 Uganda Tel: 202-966-2156 Website: www.retrak.org Discussions about this entry |
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Hi Joan, Great to see you in another competition! Could you tell us more about the businesses that the 13 boys created? Also, the questions about partners and allies are important ones. Can you provide a response? Thank you.
Dana Frasz
Changemakers