Target group:
The project was born as a concrete answer to the needs of street boys living in Sunyani, Capital of the Brong Ahafo Region in Ghana. The boys come mainly from the North and rural areas and they belong to different tribes. They come to the Capital looking for greener pastures. They leave their homes escaping poverty, lack of opportunities and dreaming of a better future, including the possibility to go to school and to get employment. But they finish living on the streets, hopeless and exploited. They generally live in the market areas and in the verandas of shops. They sleep under a table or on a bench. They are track pushers, they clean the market, they transport goods with hired wheel barrows.

The aim of the project is to take them out of the streets, offering them a home, health care, food and clothing, education facilities, professional training and religious and moral formation. They also receive medical and sanitary assistance, food, clothing, and are sponsored to go back to school at different levels (primary, Junior and Secondary School) Those who cannot go back to the formal system of education are trained in different skills (carpentry, auto mechanics, metal works, bicycle reparation, etc). Some are also sent to our Vocational Training centre at Odumase (7 km far from Sunyani). The boys support the home with their work: making blocks, growing vegetables and mushrooms, rearing animals (grasscutters, rabbits, sheep, goats and chicken). A scheme of small loans called ‘Fostered Youth Association’ has been created so that as they go out of the home they can become self-employed and get re-inserted in the Ghanaian society in a useful way.

Presently, the boys living in the home are 37, aged 10 to 18. Saturdays and Sundays a group of 100 to 200 boys visit the home for games, sports and other formation activities.

The Salesian team incharge of the project: The rector of the Community is Fr. Italo Spagnolo and the team behind the project consists of one full time Salesian Brother (Bro. Lothar Wagner, from Germany), 2 religious sisters (one Medical Sister and a Notre Dame sister), 3 expatriate volunteers from Holland (a lawyer, a social worker and a civil engineer), and five Ghanaian staff, one of them a Salesian Cooperator. Of these last five, three are full time staff and the rest part time. The other Salesians in turn visit the home in order to help with the religious education through catechesis, good nights and the animation of festivities.