Our projects
We are proud of our projects and Terre des Hommes Denmark is active in more than 33 projects distributed around some of the world’s continents; Asia, Africa and South America – India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Columbia and Ecuador. The vast majority are sponsorship projects, where the children in need get help with food, schooling and education with support from their Danish sponsors.
We collaborate with local NGOs to ensure that the projects meet our high standards for child protection.
Terre des Hommes Denmark works based on the principle “help for self-help”. Our efforts are therefore aimed at the children eventually learning to fend for themselves.
Click on each country and read more about our engagements and get an insight into the various projects.
It is useful to support. Read about selected projects.
Tanzania (1 project)
Project: Arusha
Where: Arusha, Tanzania
Purpose: The Arusha area in Tanzania is an area of extreme poverty. Many of the children are orphans and left to fend for themselves. Principal Esther Alexander decided to do something about this and built a school called INTEL, outside Arusha with room for 400 children. Ester Alexander built the school with her own funds and loans she got for the school. The purpose of the project is to help poor children whose parents cannot afford schooling, as well as orphans with schooling, food and medicine. The children go to school, where they get a hot meal every day. The principal has a sound conviction that if the children do not get food, they cannot keep up with the lessons either. Terre des Hommes Denmark’s sponsorship contribution applies to 78 children.
Kenya (1 project)
Project: Wema Centre
Where: Mombasa, Kenya
Purpose: Is to rescue, protect and rehabilitate girls, primarily but especially vulnerable street children, Wema Center is a charity founded in 1993 in Mombasa, Kenya. The center’s purpose is to rescue, rehabilitate and protect street children, orphans and other vulnerable children from the slums of Mombasa. The center seeks out children in the slums and provides them with shelter, care, education and vocational training. In addition, the children are supported health-wise, psychologically and with HIV/AIDS prevention. Where possible, the Center tracks down the children’s family and ensures reunification. Terre des Hommes Denmark sponsors 24 children in the project – 23 girls and 1 boy.
India (12 Projects)
Project: Coimbatore
Location: Coimbatore, India
Purpose: To ensure a safe upbringing and education for orphans and children of single parents. Coimbatore is a children’s home where the kids can stay until they are 18 years old. The children attend various schools, and the project currently supports 18 children.
Project: Kutch Gujarat Post-Earthquake
Location: Gujarat, India
Purpose: To ensure schooling for as many children as possible, especially girls, who are often overlooked. The project in Gujarat began after a devastating earthquake hit the area in 2001, severely impacting the poor local population. The region faces multiple challenges, including proximity to a vast salt desert, limited water availability, and high child mortality rates due to diarrheal diseases. Terre des Hommes Denmark supports 250 children in the area through sponsorships and has helped drill for water in collaboration with CASP. However, much work remains to be done.
Project: Kerala Tsunami
Location: Kerala Province, India
Purpose: Initiated after the 2004 tsunami, this project aims to support children whose parents lack the financial means to send them to school. The goal is to remain in the area until support is no longer needed. The project has established several self-help groups to empower parents to eventually afford their children’s education independently. Currently, 80 children are supported, with 100 more on the waiting list.
Project: Bustee Welfare Centre
Location: Kolkata, India
Purpose: Bustee is a well-regarded NGO operating in one of Kolkata’s slums. It runs a daycare, two schools for children from poor families, and supports education from kindergarten to the 7th grade. Afterward, Bustee arranges for the children to continue their education in other local schools. The project also includes vocational training, adult literacy programs, and various other educational initiatives. The sponsorship contributions help cover the school fees for 52 children, including uniforms, books, and extracurricular activities. The school also provides a hot lunch for the students.
Project: Ek Prayaas Educational Society – An Oasis in the Stone Desert
Location: Kolkata’s Slum, India
Purpose: To help and ensure schooling for very poor children. This private school, established in 2005, serves children from one of Kolkata’s slums. Initially founded by a group of compassionate individuals, the school was created to prevent a generation of children from becoming street children. The school has since expanded to offer classes from kindergarten to 5th grade, and the sponsorship funds are used to pay school fees for 40 children.
Project: Khetwadi – Street Children
Location: Mumbai, India
Purpose: To get street children into school. This project operates in a severely impoverished area of Mumbai. The Indian organization IAPA works voluntarily to connect with children and their families, encouraging school attendance. Through the Khetwadi project, children receive food, schoolbooks, uniforms, and education. The sponsorship funds support 80 children.
Project: Tihar Jail
Location: New Delhi, India
Purpose: To assist children of incarcerated parents. The Tihar Jail project is a sponsorship program for children whose parents are imprisoned in New Delhi’s notorious Tihar Jail. These children, who live in extreme poverty, have no opportunity for education without support. CASP India (Community Aid & Sponsorship Programme) ensures these children receive essential needs such as school uniforms, books, and psychological support. CASP also facilitates monthly meetings between the children and their incarcerated parents to maintain their bond.
Project: Pune
Location: Pune, India
Purpose: To ensure education for children whose parents lack the financial resources to send them to school. Terre des Hommes Denmark collaborates with CASP in this project, supporting 15 children. More sponsors are needed to expand the project.
Project: Terewayangani School – Village Project
Location: Terewayangani, India
Purpose: To provide education for poor village children. This project targets a village area in Terewayangani, located six hours from Mumbai. The project aims to help children complete their schooling through grades 7-9. The region is extremely poor, with most houses made of clay, no wells, and a lack of sufficient income from agriculture. Terre des Hommes currently supports 32 students, who often walk 4-5 kilometers each way to attend school. During winter, they rely on a hot meal and blankets at the school.
Project: Trankebar
Location: Trankebar, India
Purpose: To help children, especially girls, from poor families gain access to education, food, and medical care. Many parents are illiterate and do not understand the importance of education. The project also supports mentally disabled children in orphanages, who face extremely difficult conditions in India. Terre des Hommes Denmark partners with Brother I. Sebastian from the St. Joseph Development Trust to support 125 children.
Project: Balwaadi
Location: New Delhi, India
Purpose: To ensure education for children of resource-poor parents. The Balwadi system, established in 1945, initially supported rural families but is now also present in major cities. It targets resource-poor families, often newly arrived in cities, where both parents work in low-paying jobs. CASP assists these families by providing preschool and facilitating school enrollment. CASP also offers medical check-ups and addresses malnutrition. All 22 sponsored children attend school, but more sponsors are needed to help additional children.
Sri Lanka (8 Projects)
In Sri Lanka, we are active in 8 projects, most of which are focused on providing education to impoverished children. Among our other projects, we help deaf children learn sign language and lip reading, and we support a home for girls with developmental disabilities. The city of Kandy is located in a valley surrounded by small mountains in central Sri Lanka. While the city’s poor residents work tirelessly as “pluckers” on Sri Lanka’s tea plantations, tourists flock to the area’s scenic surroundings, known as Sri Lanka’s spiritual center. Meanwhile, the area’s impoverished children face an uncertain future. The parents cannot afford to send their children to school, and many children live homeless on the streets. Terre des Hommes Denmark supports children in the city through sponsorships and donations. Additionally, Terre des Hommes Denmark has established a children’s home and the “Seth Medura” home for girls with developmental disabilities. In northern Sri Lanka, Terre des Hommes Denmark supports several projects, including a school for the deaf. We also support several projects in Colombo, the island’s capital.
Project: Nugegoda
Location: Nugegoda, Sri Lanka
Purpose: To help children with schooling, food, and medicine, as their parents lack the financial means. The project is located in a slum area, including along the railway, where many people live in dilapidated houses. Earlier in the project, courses were held for the parents, where they learned about nutrition, health, and AIDS, as they earned money once a year by being blood donors. Terre des Hommes Denmark supports 75 children in the project.
A Story of How Support Makes a Difference Following the tsunami in 2004, two smaller projects were established under Nugegoda: Pelena and Danakawatta. The latter village is far from civilization but is now a well-functioning village where the help from Terre des Hommes Denmark has resulted in electricity, water, and roads, enabling the villagers to be self-sufficient. It is the greatest joy in this work when projects take off and become self-sustaining.
Project: Catholic Nuns, Sri Lanka
Location: Wattala, Sri Lanka
Purpose: To help children and young women with food, medicine, and education, so they are better equipped to handle the harsh realities of their local communities. The project supports 20 children.
Project: The Tea Plantation Project
Location: Kandy, Sri Lanka
Purpose: The Tea Plantation Project in Sri Lanka supports children’s education through sponsorships, giving them a better future. Currently, there are about 50 children in the project. Almost all the children live with their parents, some with both. There are also some children who have lost one or both parents, in which case they typically live with a grandmother. The children in the project come from poor families with very poor living conditions. Some families live in small huts without running water or electricity. Most parents have small day-labor jobs. The father might drive a rented TukTuk taxi or run a small “business.” The parents take whatever work they can get, but they have few opportunities, as most have little or no education. Many of the parents and some of the children suffer from illnesses such as asthma and need medical care and medication, which adds to the expenses for these poor families. In other words, these children face many challenges. In our project, the family receives a monthly donation. They can use the money as they wish – for food, medicine, books, transportation to school, or extra lessons, which some children receive. However, the monthly donation is conditional on the children attending school. It’s also important to highlight that we help most children move forward in life. Besides our donations, most have a stable person in the family who supports them with care and interest. Additionally, our two local partners closely follow the children’s progress. They are two nuns from the “Sisters of the Cross” order. The nuns know the families and are very involved in the children’s lives. They provide the donations to the families and ensure that we receive annual reports on the children’s education, family situation, health, and hobbies. The project’s base is two convents in Kandy, located in the center of the island. Most children come from this area. There are many tea plantations in the region, and many of the parents were formerly tea pickers. Hence the name Tea Plantation Project. The project has existed for nearly 35 years and has always been a very stable and well-functioning project.
Project: Hikkaduwa
Location: Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka.
Hikkaduwa is a popular tourist town south of the capital Colombo. Purpose: To ensure that children of poor parents or children with single parents receive an education. The project arose because many of the children lived only by begging from tourists. The parents couldn’t afford to send the children to school. Hence the sponsorship project was created. The project in Hikkaduwa is run by the Lions Club, and Terre des Hommes Denmark’s part of the project, which includes several hundred children, supports 44 children. TDH DK mainly supports children in families where the breadwinner (father) is either deceased or suffering from a life-threatening illness, so the family has to survive on a very small and insufficient income. It costs money for a school uniform and other expenses to attend school in Sri Lanka, and these poor families cannot afford to send their children to school. In the short term, it is also more profitable to send them down to the beach to beg or sell homemade items to tourists. We try successfully to counter this by offering help with schooling, food, and clothing. We thus give the children a chance to get an education, so the child and the family are not dependent on tourists but have the prospect of a better life.
Project: Halabawava
Location: Dehiwala, Sri Lanka – 250 km north of the capital Colombo
Purpose: To support children’s education and provide the family with advice and guidance on nutrition and hygiene. The goal is to expand the project, which is located in northern Sri Lanka, where there is great poverty, so severe that children do not get food every day. The families supported by TDH DK have no regular work and live in extreme poverty. If there is a father, he usually works as a day laborer, for a few days at a time with farmers and in rice fields. In many of the families supported by TDH DK, either a parent or one of the children in the sibling group is ill. Transport to and from the towns is very difficult, and buses run irregularly. Therefore, the children often have to walk a long way to school, which makes them tired already upon arrival. Some children have to go to school on an empty stomach. Even though schooling in Sri Lanka is free, the family has to pay for items such as a school uniform, school books, a school bag, and writing materials. Most families here cannot afford these things. A sponsorship contribution means everything to these poor families. The contribution enables the family to afford to let the child go to school, receive dental care, medicine, and food, and it especially helps prevent girls from being married off at an early age. TDH DK currently supports 20 children.
Project: Trincomalee – School for The Hearing Impaired
Location: Trincomalee, Sri Lanka
Purpose: To support deaf children with education and a better future. The school for the deaf accommodates 25 children aged 6 to 20 years. The deaf children are taught lip reading, pronunciation, and some sign language, in addition to regular school subjects. Lip reading is more important than sign language, as lip reading gives the children a greater chance of communicating with others. This is because it is very rare for their relatives and later their employers to learn sign language. Besides regular schooling, the school places great emphasis on teaching the children practical skills: the girls learn all forms of sewing, and the boys learn all kinds of carpentry and woodworking. This provides the children with important skills, so they can find a job and support themselves and their families when they leave school. The school has also been sponsored with computers, which the children use to communicate with the outside world and for their exams. Once a year, the children undergo a hearing test, and many need their hearing aids renewed.
Project: Seth Medura
Location: Kandy, Sri Lanka
Purpose: To support girls with developmental disabilities to live a dignified life. At Seth Medura, the girls live as though they were one big family, learning to help each other. They learn to dance and play various instruments. They also learn to help in the kitchen, where they are given small tasks they can manage. The girls have started making various handicrafts, which they sell at the nearest market. This gives the girls a great sense of self-worth. We lack sponsors for the school’s kitchen, which is in very poor condition.
Project: Elsinore – Meth Care Programme
Location: Muratuwa, Sri Lanka
Purpose: To provide children from disadvantaged families with a basic education. Moratumulla is a village near the coastal town of Moratuwa, located on the west coast of Sri Lanka, 18 kilometers south of the capital Colombo. The breadwinners in many of the families in this area are unskilled or have very little education. Several of them are dependent on alcohol and gambling, and many families live in poverty. Some of the families struggle to provide three daily meals for their children. Many mothers in the families leave the country to work as domestic helpers
Project: CCM Makanissa School for the Deaf
Location: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Number of children: 45
There is a lot of guilt, shame, and prejudice surrounding deaf people in Ethiopia. These range from beliefs that it is the mother’s fault that the children are disabled, to thinking that deaf children are possessed by evil spirits.
Through sponsorships, sponsors can help fight these prejudices and contribute to providing the children and their siblings with an education at the school for the deaf.
At the school, the children learn sign language, which is essential for them as it helps ensure a better future. It is vital because, for the first time in their lives, the children learn to communicate with the world around them and are given the opportunity to express what they feel and think.
The children come from very different backgrounds. Some come from very poor families that cannot afford to pay for schooling. Others are orphans living with foster families, where they receive food, medical care, and clothing.
Hearing children also attend the school, and as a community for all the children, everyone learns sign language in the first year at the school, and communication is done with their hands.
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Project: Esperanza – Camp Hope
Where: Quito, Ecuador
Number: 7 children
This project works to give especially vulnerable disabled children better conditions and strengthen the attachment between the child and the family. The children are offered schooling, school supplies, food, care, rehabilitation, medical care and operations as needed.
Many children in Ecuador grow up in difficult conditions. Especially in rural areas and in poor urban areas. Here is an overview of the most important challenges and conditions:
Access to education: Although Ecuador has made progress in improving access to basic education, challenges remain, especially in rural areas. The schools may be underequipped, and many children have long journeys to school.
Outcome: Many children leave school early to work and help their families financially, especially in rural areas.
Nutrition: Malnutrition is a significant problem, especially among children in rural areas and the poorest parts of cities. This affects their physical and mental development.
Health care: Access to health care is limited in some areas, and children may have difficulty getting the necessary medical treatment.
Child labour: Child labor is widespread, especially in agriculture and in informal sectors in cities. Many children work instead of going to school.
Risky jobs: Some children work in dangerous jobs, such as in mines or on plantations, exposing them to serious risks.
Poverty: Many families live in poverty, which affects the children’s upbringing and opportunities. Poverty often leads to a lack of access to basic resources such as food, clothing and housing.
Violence and abuse: Domestic violence and abuse are unfortunately also widespread, which can have serious consequences for children’s well-being and development.
Project: Socieda Catolica San Jose
Where: Las Lomas, Bolivia
Number: 14 children
Socieda San Jose, a respected organization in Bolivia, has been working with vulnerable populations for almost a century and a half.
The project in Las Lomas, which was established in 1988, works to improve the living conditions of Bolivian families through projects that focus on, among other things, the care of children, the development of children’s skills and achievements as social beings and their abilities. At the same time, there are programs with lessons on nutrition, food safety and the implementation of kitchen gardens. Just like health, an important program is about, among other things, contraception.
Background for the project.
Poverty and Nutrition: Many children in Bolivia live in poverty, especially in rural and marginalized urban areas. Poverty can lead to lack of access to proper nutrition, which can result in malnutrition and stunted growth.
Education: Despite progress in education, many children still experience challenges in accessing quality schooling. Many children, especially those from poor families, need to work to help support their families, which can mean they cannot complete their schooling. Schools in rural areas may have limited resources, including lack of textbooks, teaching materials and qualified teachers.
Work and Child Labor: Child labor is still a significant problem in Bolivia. Many children work in agriculture, mining or in informal sectors in cities. This can affect their ability to attend school and have a normal childhood.
Project: Orientame
Where: Bogota, Colombia
Number: 154 children
Oriéntame works to protect children in Bogota’s slums from reducing teenage pregnancy, prostitution, crime, abuse and street violence by focusing on four areas: social inclusion, general health, family planning and development. The child receives support for his schooling in the form of school materials, uniform and support to find a suitable school, which ensures the child’s healthy psychosocial development. The program is called Acompaña un sueño.
Background for the project:
In Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, many children live in poor conditions in the slums, where they have limited access to health and education. These neighborhoods are dangerous for the children, as there is a high risk of crime, abuse, prostitution and street violence.
These children come from vulnerable families where the mother is often the sole breadwinner, which makes the children further vulnerable to the risk of abuse, exploitation, malnutrition, lack of attention to their health, early school leaving and teenage pregnancies.
