• Sierra Leone, a coastal country in West Africa, ranks among the poorest worldwide. With 56.8% of the population living below the national poverty line, Sierra Leone is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world.
• With a surface area of 71,740 km² the country is 1.7 times the size of Switzerland. The climate is tropical with heavy rains transforming the dry savannahs into lush plains during the rainy season.
• Sierra Leone is still recovering from a brutal civil war (1991-2002) and was making great strides with reconstruction, peacebuilding, and development until the Ebola outbreak in March 2014. Ebola took the lives of nearly 4,000 people and overwhelmed the country’s fragile health system. Many hard-earned development gains since the war were lost. Pre-existing public health issues like extremely high infant, child, and maternal mortality rates soared. Sierra Leone’s understaffed, underequipped and inadequately trained health system has been struggling since then.
• Sierra Leone with its very young population has a very low literacy rate of below 50%, and enrolment rates in primary school children vary considerably, as there are few schools. Even though the country’s constitution guarantees the right of everyone to education, many children do not have the chance to go to school.
• Today Sierra Leone is enjoying relative political stability and is run by a directly elected president, Julius Maada Bio, and a unicameral legislature.

FAFA – Franziska’s Agricultural Farmers Association was established by the villagers of Worreh Yeama in northern Sierra Leone in 2016 and officially registered as a community-based organisation. Franziska, who did research on a Swiss Bioenergy project and lived in Worreh Yeama in 2013/14, has become the namesake of FAFA. She registered the association “Verein FAFA Schweiz” in Switzerland in 2021 to help the small local organisation fundraise.

The goal of FAFA is to support the schooling of children from the poorest families out of the revenue generated through farming on their communal land, and to find a way to rehabilitate and register the derelict primary school. Their main motivation is to provide their children with education so that they will not feel as disempowered as their parents do.

Suyana started to support its first development project with FAFA in Sierra Leone in September 2021. We are committed to improving access to primary school education for the children of the local communities in and around Worreh Yeama.