Afronline – The Voice Of Africa

This month Afronline meets Keoogo, a NGO from Burkina Faso, that works with the street children of the capital, Ouagadougou.

Who: Keoogo

Where: Burkina Faso

What: help to the street children of Ouagadougou

“Street children are not our business”. Words of Sawadogo Oussoumana, the founder and coordinator of the association Keoogo, which main aim in the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, is to reach all of the children living in the streets.

“Our work is based on a community approach,” explains Oussoumana. “The street children phenomenon is something that the whole community has to take care of, and that is the reason why we are trying to involve everyone in finding solutions, trying to make people, families, institutions and religious leaders aware of the problem”.

According to a recent investigation made by the burkinabé NGO, there are 8,063 children living, working and begging in the streets of Ouagadougou. 1000 of these don’t have a home, and streets become a place to find a shelter for the night.

In the moorè language – which is spoken by 70% of burkinabè people – “Keoogo” means “initiation space”.

“It is in this way that the traditional mossie society calls the education sphere where the transmission of values happens,” explains Oussoumana.

“People who haven’t done the initiation cannot participate in the meetings and, as a consequence, the community decision. They are as excluded from society as street children are”.

Sawadogo, a nurse, started working with street children seven years ago, joining a project launched and financed by Doctors Without Borders.

“After three years the NGO closed the project and funds ended,” says Oussoumana. “So the other burkinabé colleagues and I asked ourselves what to do for the future of this project. We didn’t want to abandon the children of the streets of Ouagadougou we were working with. We decided to set up a local association and look for other funds to go on with the project”.

In Ouagadougou, the Keoogo association, which is currently financed by the Unidea-UniCredit Foundation, Unicef and Save the children, is the only NGO that works in the streets, where it helps children both on the sanitary and psycho-social level.

“We have chosen to work without reception houses,” says Lassina Zampou, the project manager of the NGO. “Usually when children conclude their period in those houses they are maladjusted, they have to reinsert themselves into society again”.

Keoogo reaches children through various teams where nurses, educators and former street children – who play the role of medium to get in contact with children, often mistrustful of adults and institutions – work.

The sanitary work is undertaken by a team of nurses, who provides basic health assistance and vaccines in the streets of the capital.

“The sanitary approach is a way to establish a relationship of trust with street children and to help them in the reintegration of  society,” says Issa Ouedraogo, the Keoogo health responsible.

Depending on different children’s needs, Keoogo asks for help from institutions, families and other associations on the ground.

“First of all, we try to find the original family of the child and to organise a reunion,” says Sawadogo. “If this is not possible, we ask other families – usually people that we already know – if they can follow or welcome the child in their home. And sometimes it actually happens! When it comes to education, we talk with teachers to understand if public schools can take care of the child, otherwise we need to pay private schools fees through a system of long distance sponsoring.

When possible Keoogo tries to teach a job to streets children through local craftsmen that welcome into their workshop a trainee, paying his maintenance and teaching him the job.

Keoogo has also improved the relationship with the police. “In the beginning policemen used to have a harsh behaviour with street children,” says Sawadogo.

“Sometimes there were raids and children were detained in police offices for three months, together with adults in the same cells. First, we obtained the separation between children and adults, because of the frequent abuses. After that, we obtained the reduction of the time they had to spend in jail, that now never goes over three days”.

But according to Keoogo the most important victory was a change in mentality. “Now policemen are more collaborative, they participate in education courses and know that there is an NGO which takes care of the Ouagadougou street children.”

“Doctors Without Borders, who started this project, had enough funds to go on in an autonomous way,” says Oussoumana.

“We had to look for new partners and create a network, which was a good solution that pushed us to look for other realities with which to collaborate. With time we have understood that the fact that we are not autonomous could even be an advantage just like being burkinabé: a factor that has helped us to understand the real reasons of the problem and to look for solutions inside the community”.

For more information on the NGO visit www.keoogo.org

By Emanuela Citterio – Afronline.org