Govt urged to intervene in illegal sale of Mbale Child Restoration Centre

Mbale, (UG):- Bugisu cultural leaders have asked the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development to quickly intervene in and stop owners of the building which houses the famed Child Restoration Outreach (CRO) in Mbale City from selling the centre.

The popular child training centre in Mbale is where thousands of street children within the city and beyond are trained and managed, and has over the years equipped many with accepted survival community skills like petty businesses especially the sale of padlocks after being rehabilitated, while others have been encouraged to go back to school and paid for as well.

The child restoration outreach as popularly known was established as a philanthropic centre, meant to equip street children in Mbale town with skills to live a decent life, mostly those who were displaced by cattle raiding activities in Karamoja and hence sought solace in the streets of Mbale town.

However, with time other groups that were not even affected by cattle raiding activities and insurgencies also joined in, you currently find children from various districts of masabaland in need of help from the NGO.

The motives as to why the organization is being sold out to YY bus services can’t be established since nobody was willing to be interviewed for this sensitive story, but unconfirmed sources say the donors lost interest in the project.

“There is resistance towards, the sale of the building because many Bamasaba think the money invested in such projects, is normally raised in the name of bamasaba people and it is wrong to sell such an asset,” Hajj Mansa Musa, a resident of Mbale City told this website, before suggesting that such a building should instead be given to Inzu Ya Masaaba, a view shared by Betty Mabonga, a former probation officer at Mbale DLG.

A local newspaper; Monitor recently reported on how HIV in Mbale City is supersonically shooting up especially among teenage street children, because there is no organization available to counsel and advise these young children, and the collapse of such a sensitive unit such as the CRO will deflate all efforts aimed at protecting street children.

The statistics on children are hard to come by and it is even hard to establish how many they are but ocular observation, indicates that they are in their hundreds and many of them engage in illegal activities like homosexuality, petty theft, and prostitution among other prohibited occupations, while others sleep on the streets, many are seen drinking trans night.