PROJECT OVERVIEW: A new building ensuring the safe accommodation, support and learning environment for some of the most vulnerable young girls from or around the city landfill of Cagayan De Oro, The Philippines. These girls are victims of serious abuse in both the domestic environment and from within the community at large. The girls are currently at very serious risk of further abuse, kidnapping and human trafficking.
We have already built one such accommodation and due to its success we are replicating the structure. The project will be fully sustainable and run by highly experienced professionals on the ground who have been working within the community for many years and are remunerated on a local level by another organisation.
The girls are largely from the waste picker community located on and around the 17 hectare garbage dumping site of CDO. In this depressed area, approximately 1,900 socially deprived people are living in about 350 families. They survive from waste picking with incomes far below the poverty line.
The city landfill of Cagayan De Oro, The Philippines.
They are working under extremely unhealthy and dangerous conditions and without any social securities. The children who work on the landfill often have no access to education or drop out from school due to truancy or early marriage. The project will be utilising the tried and tested method of raising the children in small family like units rather than putting them in an orphanage.
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: The primary aim of this project is to tackle the immediate and urgent problem of abused girls having nowhere or no one to turn to in this highly impoverished and deeply unequal society.
The new building and its staff will offer refuge, counselling, support and rehabilitation. The objective of the project is to help girls with the next steps of their childhood or journey into adulthood, via placements in safer family environments, the assistance of arranging long term care or providing access to further education and healthcare.
In a similar way to our existing project in the same area, the overall goal is for the girls to move on in a safe and structured manner and free up space for future children in need.
TIMELINE: The construction of the project can begin in May/June 2019 and we will welcome the first girls on October of the same year. We will be working with teams on the ground with whom we have had much previous success and following a plan and budget that was followed without incident or over run in 2016/17.
BUDGET AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
The total budget of the building is approximately 32,212 GBP (2,233,627 PHP) Approximately the same cost as our previous successful building in the same area. The Economist generously donated £19,500 towards this project.
PROGRESS PHOTOS:
