The Children’s Transformation Trust (CTT)

The Children’s Transformation Trust (CTT) organises recreational activities, training and awareness raising on child rights, child protection, street life, and reproductive health.

An average of 450 children benefit directly from the activities and support offered by CTT. In addition, the economic empowerment programme consists of support to women’s self help benefiting approximately 2400 children indirectly.

CTT was set up in Lusaka in 2003 by a team of 4, including two young men with first hand experience on the streets of Zambia. CTT’s activities started off with a feeding programme, but in response to a noticeable gap in street children services changed its focus in 2006 to prevention work. CTT has since been committed to working with the children often overlooked by other agencies, namely those at risk of ‘drifting to the streets.’ This focus makes CTT quite unique amongst SCA partner organisations.

CTT works with children, their families/guardians, local leaders, volunteer community mobilisers and other organisations at the community level to prevent children from ending up on the streets. They have two main programmes: prevention of street migration and economic empowerment for women. The small CTT office is based at the Beit Orphans and Vulnerable Community School in Chawama, where they share the infrastructure with the school. CTT currently works in 4 townships: Chawama, Misisi, John Laing, and Kanyama. These areas were identified through a social mapping exercise as areas where a significant number of children on the streets of Lusaka came from. In each of these areas CTT works with community mobilisers, who help to identify the children most at risk. These are then linked to services, offered psycho-social support and/or helped with educational support.

The volunteer community mobilizers are identified and trained to do vulnerability assessments at a local level, which means they are able to identify and collect accurate data on children at risk. These children include some who have never been to school and are not linked to any services at all. Community mobilisers also play an important role in monitoring child protection within the community, reporting cases of abuse to the police.