Royal Seed Home in Ghana, West Africa, is a lifeline for more than 150 orphaned or abandoned children. These children are provided with education, healthcare, clean water and food. Unfortunately, the Orphanage is overcrowded and underfunded, and desperately needs to expand to avoid being shut down.

In 2014, with the help of generous supporters, we began work on a building project to expand the orphanage. In June 2016, eight volunteers are travelling back to Ghana to spend 2 weeks helping build the children of Royal Seed Home a new space to sleep, eat and learn.

We need your help! Every single donation is a step towards housing these children in a comfortable and safe environment. We have already made such incredible progress on site thanks our supporters. Let's get this second building done. Together, we can provide for these children who aren't as lucky as most of us. They have truly captured our hearts, and we want to show them that there are a lot people who care about their welfare.

The team are looking to raise $25,000AUD to purchase building materials and employ local tradespeople to construct the new building. Volunteers are all funding their own trips, so donations will go directly towards building a new home for the children of Royal Seed Home. In addition to this, the eight of us will be as hands on as possible, helping the trades people out on site and doing whatever we can to contribute to the building process.

Want to know what your donation will buy? Here's a guide of some costs of materials & hiring trades people:

Wage for a builders labourer: $25 AUD per day
Wage for a foreman: $30 AUD per day
1 Block: $1.20
1 Bag of cement : $11
1 Box of nails: $27  

And here is a breakdown of how we will be spending the funds raised ($AUD):

Materials:
$7,000 - Concrete Blocks
$2,400 - Sand
$1,100 - Gravel
$2,200 - Cement
$200 - Formwork
$100 - Nails
$800 - Reinforcing steel
$6,400 - Roof framing & sheeting

Labour & Logistics:
$4,000 - Tradespeople
$800 - Water & Transport

For us the trip is two-fold.

We’re focused on getting the building up and running and will spend the money we’ve raised on that, but secondary to that we will spend some of our time at Royal Seed home, helping where we can with day to day operations and caring for the children. While these kids are well cared for, they don’t often get one on one interaction, and any attention and care is always well received.

The of the biggest challenges is the steady flow of money for the orphanage to invest in a big scale project like this, especially when the running costs of the orphanage can be so high. Our best case scenario is to take some of the financial pressure off the day to day running of the orphanage and invest our funds in a sustainable new building for them.

One of the other challenges for a project like this is unplanned hiccups like materials not arriving on time, unseasonable weather events and delays, which can happen on a building site anywhere in the world. We're doing what we can to deal with these things - for example we need to order materials at least two weeks ahead of arriving to make sure they're on site. So we're arranging money to be sent early to make sure this is issue is mediated. Our contact at the orphanage is keeping us up to date with the stage the building is at and what the next step will be so we can work through these issues and make sure our 2 weeks is spend efficiently and effectively seeing out the project.There is also a lot of fluctuation in building material prices. We have tried our very best to calculate building costs based on information provided to us by our contacts in Ghana. Like any project, we will do our best to manage costs and get the building done on budget.