Tigers - Frequently Asked Questions

1. Most of the work of the Tigers Club project is with boys. Why?

We have often been asked why our direct beneficiaries are male and to what extent the Tigers Club Project seeks to work with girls. There are several reasons for our current focus on street boys:

Characteristics of the homeless children population of Kampala:
There are ten times more boys than girls on the streets of Kampala. There therefore exists a real need for targeted interventions addressing the needs of street boys.

The nature of the work of the Tigers Club Project and its inherent strengths:
Football has played a central role in reaching out to abandoned children since the project was first started. In Uganda, football remains a male-dominated sport. Reaching out to girls would thus require the design and implementation of a different set of outreach tools.

Strategic, human and financial resource implications in working with girls:
Working with runaway girls would require an entirely separate strategy and outreach approach, for the following reasons:

Homeless girls are more hidden and thus less easy to identify. Contrary to boys, who beg or seek small jobs in public areas such as markets or at traffic lights, girls are often employed as house girls or are caught up in networks of prostitution, which are difficult and sometimes dangerous for any agency to break into.
The physical and emotional abuse which girl children are likely to have experienced prior to and during street life is very different from abuse experienced by boys. Work with street girls therefore requires a very specific social work and counselling strategy.
Feasibility studies conducted by the Tigers Club Project have shed light on the lack of interaction between homeless boys and girls in Kampala. Work with abandoned girls would thus be difficult to combine with outreach and care for homeless boys.

Implementing two such different strategies would entail human and financial resource implications which the Tigers Club Project cannot do justice to at this point.

Our wish to avoid duplication of efforts
There are other NGOs in Uganda who work directly with homeless girls. We therefore prefer to work in close partnership with such organisations, by providing technical and financial assistance to them, rather than duplicating efforts, human and financial resources.