CLL Residential and Rehabilitation Centre for Street Boys, Ibeshe.

The planned development of the Centre is still far from completion.  When funds permit the following will be built: an Administration building with library and conference room, a second boarding house (which would enable us to double the intake), and a block of six vocational workshops.  In the meantime a second shed is being converted to a temporary workshop for textiles: tie-and-dye, batik and tailoring. The most urgent need,however, is funding for the construction of an all-weather road to replace the bush-path to the Centre.  At present vehicles are unable to use the path during the worst of the rainy season.  

A Girls’ Residential Centre.

Although far fewer girls than boys are visible on the street, there is an urgent need for a residential centre for girls.  It appears that a high percentage of girls on the street come from a considerable distance from Lagos.  The difficulty of tracing their families will be correspondingly more difficult.  Child Life-Line is therefore seeking funds to buy a piece of land on which to build a hostel or a suitable building that can be converted to a girls’  hostel.  

Reception Centres.

The programme at the Ibeshe Centre has been very successful in many ways but the number of children who have benefited from it is but a drop in the ocean when set against the thousands of children out on the streets to-day.  The sheer number precludes any attempt to provide residential accommodation for all, even if that were desirable. 

There will always be a few children who, for one reason or another, have no family to return to but for most children their place is with their own families. CLL is therefore planning to adopt a new strategy, moulded on the pattern of the ‘drop-in’ or Reception Centres like those pioneered by the Undugu Society of Kenya and other Child Welfare organizations.  There the children’s basic needs are met: food, clothes, medical attention and education. 

The heart of the programme is the careful assessment of each child and the counseling of both child and parent(s) in order to  reconcile and reunite them and reintegrate the child in the community. CLL is urgently searching for suitable buildings in areas where street children cluster, (i.e. in areas of big markets or bus depots where they find odd jobs on which they survive), and seeking the necessary financial backing to convert the building to meet the needs of the children.  Such buildings might be old warehouses, offices or houses.