Our Sanitation, Our Health
The Cost of Waste on Young Lives
Ghana generates 1.7 million tonnes of solid waste daily, but barely 60% is collected. The rest clogs drains, floods homes, and creates breeding grounds for disease—a crisis worsened by extreme climate patterns and widespread open defecation.
For street-connected children, this waste crisis is directly harmful. Scavenging through e-waste without protection exposes them to toxic lead and mercury, causing heavy metal poisoning that damages brain development and learning.
Through Our Sanitation, Our Health, Starlight targets the root of both problems. Protecting our climate and protecting vulnerable children are the exact same fight.
A Seat at the Table for Ghana's Young Climate Voices, Every Year
Starlight Foundation now convenes LCOY Ghana, Ghana’s Local Conference of Youth on Climate Change, officially endorsed by YOUNGO, the youth constituency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This isn’t a one-off event. It’s become a standing part of Our Sanitation, Our Health, our answer to the question of what happens once young people understand the crisis in front of them: they get somewhere to take that understanding, and a real chance of being heard.
Each edition brings young Ghanaians together for two days of keynote sessions, a youth innovation showcase, and breakout discussions across three tracks, climate justice and equity, green innovation and entrepreneurship, and policy and advocacy. It builds towards one outcome every year: a Youth Climate Declaration, a formal set of demands and recommendations written and adopted by young Ghanaians themselves, which we submit directly to Ghana’s Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, and to the country’s official delegation ahead of that year’s COP summit.
We launched the conference in a virtual format, and deliberately so. An in-person event in Accra would only ever reach young people who could afford the bus fare and a day off work, the same barrier we push against everywhere else at Starlight. Virtual meant reaching the young farmer in Bolgatanga watching the rains arrive later every year, and the students in Winneba whose school floods every rainy season, from day one.
As the conference grows year on year, so will its format. The plan is for future editions to build in-person gatherings alongside the virtual programme, regional hubs and physical meet-ups that let young delegates stand in the same room, without ever giving up the reach that made this conference possible for young people who couldn’t otherwise attend at all. Virtual got the doors open. In-person is how we deepen what happens once people walk through them.
What's Happened Since We Started
Real numbers, honestly counted, from two campaign phases since 2018
directly through our sanitation and clean-up campaigns
so far, Dome Market and Accra Art Centre Beach
fighting for cleaner, safer streets
From Clean-Up Days to a Real Shield for Children
Two campaigns in eight years tells us something honest: this work has proven it matters, and it hasn’t yet had the sustained backing to become what it should be. LCOY Ghana is a sign of that ambition growing, this project reaching beyond local clean-up days to give young Ghanaians a standing voice in the national and international conversation about the crisis they’re living through. The next stage is about consistency, regular clean-up and sensitisation activity rather than occasional campaigns, so that communities feel the presence of this project year round, not just when funding allows.
We’re also building a clearer bridge between this project and the rest of Starlight’s work. When our teams identify street-connected children scavenging at dump or e-waste sites, the goal is a direct pathway into our education and livelihood programmes, Teach Them Young, Menso Meka Ho Bi, rather than a one-off warning about the dangers of what they’re doing. Cleaner streets matter. But for these children specifically, a way out of the dump site matters more.
How Our Sanitation, Our Health Works
Three strands, because cleaning up a community and protecting its children are the same job
Help Us Build Streets No Child Has to Scavenge
Every clean-up day funded, every family reached with waste separation training, and every child guided away from a dump site instead of towards one, is a small piece of a cleaner, safer, more climate resilient Accra. Whether you can fund equipment, sponsor a clean-up day or simply spread the word, there’s a place for you in this.
Donate
Every contribution—whether your time, resources, or voice—helps us keep a child in school and off the streets. Here is how you can stand with us:
Volunteer
Join our team on the ground in Ghana or contribute remotely with your expertise in mentorship, research, media, or event planning.
Partner & Sponsor
Collaborate with us through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, institutional grants, or campaign sponsorships to amplify our reach.