1996-2012

“Nights are not restful in Cambodia.
Darkness is teeming with ghosts.”
 — Tiziano Terzani

20 years of civil war, political upheaval, poverty, corruption, violence, children sold for little money, girls trafficked for the sex market, Aids, 9 million mines scattered in the fields, and the appalling legacy left by Pol Pot, that’s how Cambodia presented itself in 1996, when ABBA was born, and when we “adopted” Hagar, a project born two years earlier, in favor of mothers with street children and victims of trafficking in human being.

Since then Cambodia has made great strides, but children continue to disappear and women are still consumer goods to be thrown away after use.

The Hagar Project is a global program that aims to help women and children transform their lives and find a decent place in society, through shelter, care, training, employment and social reintegration.

With a large reception centre in the capital, training for women, family homes for street children and a centre for disabled children, the project began and gradually expanded with a series of programmes to reach the poorest and most remote provinces of Cambodia.

ABBA has contributed to the development of the project in all its forms, with the financing of the structures and the support of the various programmes.