Bringing dignity to life in townships
Friends for townshipsEvery week, hundreds of visitors walk through Langa, the oldest township in South Africa. They see beauty. Resilience. Reality. Most of them fly home and leave it there. Friends for Townships exists for those who don’t.
MAKE AN IMPACT
How it works
Choose a project
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DONATE FOR LANGA
Projects that need your support
Schools
Imagine going to school on an empty stomach, in worn-out shoes, in a classroom with seventy-five other children. For most kids in Langa, that’s an ordinary morning. Their schools step in where home can’t — providing a meal, a uniform, a fighting chance. The teachers stay motivated. The students stay hungry to lift up their community. What’s missing are the resources to match their drive.
Sport
What keeps a teenager away from substance use and risky activities? Not lectures. Not warnings. According to a model that transformed youth behaviour in Iceland — and is now taking root in Langa — the answer is simpler and harder at once: belonging. A team. A coach who shows up. A reason to be somewhere on Tuesday afternoon. Sport delivers all of that, plus confidence, friendships, and skills that outlast the final whistle. In Langa, the will is there. The kit, the balls, the boots — those are what’s missing.
Orphanages / Children’s homes
Thirty children, six caregivers, one safe roof. That’s Ikhaya Lekamva — and for the kids who live there, it’s everything. They go to school. They do their homework. They talk, without flinching, about the lives they want to build and the communities they want to give back to. None of it runs on government money. A home like this needs around €5,000 a month to keep going — roughly €160 per child for food, care, school, safety. And in Langa, far more children are waiting for a place like this than there are beds.
Disabled centre
Living with a disability in a shack. Try to picture it for a moment — the uneven ground, the narrow doorways, the impossibility of it. Cheshire Home Langa exists for exactly this reason. Twenty-six residents, all in wheelchairs, cared for by a team of eighteen who refuse to let circumstance decide what dignity looks like. Government support covers part of the cost. Donations cover the rest — and right now, the rest is what’s missing. One working toilet for twenty-six people. A stove and a half in the kitchen. A roof that leaks. The needs are urgent, specific, and small enough that a single gift can fix one of them outright.
ABOUT LANGA
A place that stays
with you
Langa is Cape Town’s oldest township. Home to around 70,000 people. Vibrant. Proud. And facing realities most of us will never know firsthand.
More than half of residents are unemployed. Many live in shacks — shelters of corrugated iron and reclaimed wood, with no running water, no toilet, no heat. For water or a bathroom, you walk. Sometimes hundreds of metres. Children go to school on an empty stomach. Classes of 70 or more. After school: the street. Because home offers nothing — and certainly not a safe place to do homework.
And yet. There is life here. Warmth. People with plans, with dreams, with a fierce desire to build something better.
With relatively small amounts of money, real change is possible.
ABOUT US
The story behind Friends for Townships
“It’s a privilege to lead a life
that enables you to help others.”
– Henk-Steven Renzenbrink, founder
The first time I walked into Langa, something in me stopped.
Just a few kilometres from the centre of Cape Town, I suddenly found myself in a completely different world. On one side of the city people live in comfort, surrounded by opportunity. On the other side, thousands of people live in small shacks made from scrap wood and corrugated metal.
The contrast is hard to describe.
I remember thinking:
How can this exist in the same place?
But what stayed with me even more than the poverty was something else.
Life.
Children playing in the streets.
People greeting each other.
Tour guides proudly telling the story of their community.
Despite everything, there was dignity.
And I felt a quiet thought arise:
Maybe I can be part of the solution.
BECOME A FRIEND
Staying connected matters
As a Friend of Langa, you receive updates from the township, stories of the people your support reaches, news about projects, moments that remind you why it matters. It takes thirty seconds. And it means Langa stays on your radar instead of fading into a memory.
Because out of sight shouldn’t mean out of mind.
