ChildVoice was founded in 2006 to restore the voices of children silenced by war in northern Uganda. At that time, more than 30,000 children had been abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and forced to become soldiers. Of the children who were able to escape, many returned home to face innumerable hardships, from post-traumatic stress disorder to a lack of educational opportunities.

Since 2007, ChildVoice’s Lukome Center has provided a therapeutic community for adolescent girls including former child soldiers and sex slaves, war orphans, child mothers, and other highly vulnerable girls in northern Uganda. At the Center, girls are able to recover from the trauma of war and receive the educational and vocational training they so desperately need to rebuild their lives.

While peace has returned to Uganda, the effects of years of civil war have left generations of families struggling to survive amid abject poverty.

Today, there are 35 conflict zones around the world where children are growing up in war-torn communities. ChildVoice is working diligently to expand its services to include war-affected children in South Sudan and beyond.

We currently are planning a campus in Yei, South Sudan, in order to house and educate the many former child soldiers returning from the country’s most recent civil war. Like our therapeutic community in Uganda, this campus will provide counseling, education, and vocational training in a residential community. Because the child soldiers in this conflict are primarily male, students at the campus will be limited to adolescent boys.