Our Partners

It all started with this NGO founded in the year 2000 by Gilberte Saint Cast in France and Père Albert Kaboré in Koudougou. They have helped about 45 girls a year through secondary school. Since 2011, we have given a grant to each of Solidarité’s beneficiaries who passed their baccalaureate exam (and even some who didn’t) to go on to higher education.

Christine works full-time as Christiane’s assistant in Ouagadougou. With a degree in accounting and human resource management, she manages the admin and accounts under Christiane’s supervision. Christine is the girls’ first point of contact and is regularly in touch with them to follow up with their lives and needs. She organizes programmes like the sexual health seminar or computer workshops.

With a 6,000 CHF grant from the UN Women’s Guild in Geneva, we established a Health Fund to cover all medical costs for our beneficiaries. Dr. Etienne Traoré headed the fund on a volunteer basis, describing his role as “in charge of the fight against disease”. In 2023, he withdrew as Director for health reasons and was replaced by Djénéba Ouedraogo, who is director of a health clinic in Ouagadougou.

Michel is a male nurse, expert in health security in the workplace and works for the office of workers’ health.

Abdoulaye took photos for us as an amateur and we noticed he had a good eye. We sent him to the Imagine Institute in Ouagadougou for professional training and bought him a nice Canon camera. Now he's our official photographer.

Now that our beneficiaries have computers, they’ll need to know how to use them. We have been running introductory computer courses since 2019. Romain Ilboudo, a computer expert from Ouagadougou gave the three-day course to our ten new beneficiaries in September 2022.

Christiane is our anchor in Ouagadougou. She is a managing consultant and gives her time free for BWEF, writing checks, balancing the books, and sending us monthly reports and bank statements. She keeps an eye on the girls and arranges meetings for them to get to know each other and help each other out.

Mariam is an accountant by profession and a founding member of an association of Burkina university women set up by Christiane Toé three decades ago.

Djénéba was introduced to us by her sister, who is a member of our Board. She worked for an organization that has health clinics in all three cities where our young women study—Ouagadougou, Koudougou and Bobo Dioulasso. There are doctors, gynaecologists and nurses on duty, a one-stop shopping for health care. Our Health Fund will reimburse all costs.

Noëlie is the director of a dressmaking school with 35 students, which we partially subsidize.

Boubié trains our girls’ soccer team. The brother-in-law of our former beneficiary, now primary school teacher Brigitte, Boubié had a boys’ soccer club designed to keep the kids in school. Fred challenged him to start a girls’ team and said we would support him. He did so immediately. He is also a policeman, coach of the police soccer team and is studying to be certified as a coach.

David, a computer technician with the Rennes School District, asked his bosses if he could give us their used computers when they were replaced. They agreed. David cleans them, repairs them if necessary and gives them to us. Thanks to him, virtually every young woman helped by us has a computer.