Humanitarian help for food

Project location: Burkina Faso, Koudougou
Project start date: October 2008 - Project end date: January 2009
Project number: 2008-17
Beneficiary: Doyenné De Réo

The Doyenné of Réo is one the five dioceses of Koudougou in Burkina Faso (West Africa). Any Doyenné is a group of parishes having in common a certain territory. The Doyenné of Réo, also called "Doyenné de l'Ouest" (West Doyenné) is composed of five parishes: Réo (founded in 1912, the third older parish of all the country created by White Fathers missionaries), Didyr (1952), Ténado (1967), Kwarje (Kordié) (1999), Zoula (2002). The first purpose of all these parishes is to proclaim and to implement the Gospel of salvation of Jesus Christ. But viewed in the particular context of poverty in Africa, it was soon clear that evangelization must go hand in hand with development. And this conviction is taken into account in the way of running day-to-day pastoral ministry.
The present project is to be understood in this sense. It aims at helping to cope with an emergency situation of famine caused by floods at the end of the last rainy season in the Doyenné of Réo. Those floods damaged the crops of the population, creating a scarcity of food. Merchants are profiting from this unhappy situation by raising the prices of everything and that is catastrophic for a population without any real purchasing power.
Concretely, the project's purpose is to buy some cereals to make some food stocks to be distributed to the poorest people, without any religious consideration, during what is called the hard season, namely from July to September. During that period, usually, people dedicate themselves to their hard and most traditional agricultural activities. But at the same time it is in the very course of this period that they have little or even nothing to eat. Certainly that is a serious problem to be tackled once for all, but it cannot be done in a short run for many reasons. There are many structural and cultural factors which thwart a solution to the matter, and which are to be removed one by one. These measures call for a profound and true change of mentality.
For the moment, the great concern is to cope with the menacing situation of famine
the signs of which can already be seen.

The aim of the project cofounded by the Nando Peretti Foundation is to acquire a certain number of sacks of maize or millet, to distribute to the population of the Doyenné of Réo.