Sahel Aid started when a well-respected religious scholar and a humanitarian crossed paths in Cote d’Ivoire, became friends, debated, argued, agreed, disagreed, and ultimately, agreed to disagree on almost everything. From those long discussions, a true friendship was born and cemented through their love of West Africa, its children, and how to improve its education systems. That love of West Africa and the education of its children is one area they fully agree on.

 

One day, Imam Ouedradogo, the religious scholar, took Alain, the humanitarian, on a visit to one of the poorest koranic schools in the Abidjan neighborhood of Adjamé. This school taught destitute students, mainly the children of sex workers and market sellers. After lengthy discussions with the sole teacher who was responsible for teaching 200 children and with some of the students and their parents, everyone expressed their desire to have a science program. It was from these aspirations of the Adjamé community that Sahel Aid! was born.

 

After years of working in complex humanitarian emergencies in every corner of the world, Alain had come to realize that a new approach was greatly needed in the aid sector. He knew that the existing assistance paradigm, which consisted of the use of degrading pictures of emaciated African children and of the overreliance on foreign “saviors” as the only experts, combined with the lack of rigorous metrics and evidence-based programming, had caused more harm than good in this part of our continent. He knew that Sahel Aid! needed to engage people differently.

 

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At Sahel Aid, our approach is to immerse ourselves in our community, engaging with its members to help us design and implement effective interventions. Most of our staff are hired from the communities we serve. Through the use of design thinking, we craft and implement good, effective, low-cost, and data driven programs to address challenging issues in education. With the support and approval of our communities and through the use of continuous feedback mechanisms, we adjust as necessary before scaling up our initiatives. This approach can be summed up by the West African expression “On est ensemble,” which we have adopted as Sahel Aid!’s motto.

 

After three years, Alain left Cote d’Ivoire to pursue a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School. The vastness of the Atlantic Ocean did not end his friendship with the Imam or his commitment to the children of the Sahel region. While Alain focused on data and program evaluation metrics, leadership, and behavioral economics, always with the end goal of improving humanitarian projects and outcomes.

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Sahel Aid! is now a registered US global non-profit organization with the mission of working with communities to improve education in the Sahel region.

 

We invite you to take part in our journey of transforming education in West Africa …. “On est ensemble.”