All children deserve access to basic needs like food, shelter and education. However, according to the 2024 report by the Human Rights Watch, Uganda has one of the largest populations of young people in the world with over 56 percent of its 37 million people under the age of 18, and more than 52 percent under age 15. Children are also the single largest demographic group living in poverty as UNICEF highlights that over 400 million children globally live in multidimensional poverty. According to civil society groups and local government officials who assist street children,,, the number of Ugandan children living on the streets is increasing. There are about 16,000 children on the streets across the country. This increase has been due to factors like poverty, domestic violence, child abuse, and loss of parents. We aim to support and value youth by educating children about the dangers of the streets , providing access to safe spaces, empowering families with financial skills, and involving the community in protecting children from landing on the streets. Streetlights Uganda ensures that children have access to the things they need to avoid choosing the streets as a safe space. 

Streetlights Uganda, is a youth-led, trauma-informed nonprofit based in Kampala that uses art for creative empowerment. With a mission to use art for creative empowerment of children living and or working on the streets to unearth their full potential. Founded in 2014 from a student-led internship campaign, “Buy-a-Stone, Save-a-Life,” Streetlights-Uganda’s journey began by teaching street-children on the roadside in one neighborhood, and now reaches many Kampala slums: Bwaise, Soweto, Kibuli, Kirombe, and rural areas like Hoima and Karamoja.

At 19years old, our team leader Victoria Merab Akinyi, a visual-artist and social-entrepreneur who survived poverty and abandonment in a family of seven co-founded Streetlights Uganda together with her three colleagues while at the University. Raised by a single-mother for over 20years and selling fish on Kampala’s streets, Akinyi saw firsthand how children end up homeless, unseen, unloved, and unsafe. That pain gave birth to purpose: to transform street-connected lives through the healing power of art.

Believing poverty is the root cause of homelessness, Streetlights-Uganda’s work is anchored in three pillars: creative-empowerment of children, creative-entrepreneurial skilling and strengthening of vulnerable-families, and community-engagement in child protection through outreach, advocacy and exhibitions.