Bani, Burkina Faso

Photographer: Matjaz Krivic

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

For a few days each week, Kadi Cisse, 24, teaches at a school for married women in Bani, a town in northern Burkina Faso. The school is run by Mwangaza-action, an organisation based in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, that helps local communities organise themselves. As an offshoot of this work, Kadi is building a house where she can live with a group of homeless children. She also helps fifty other women from Bani pool money into a fund that pays school and medical fees for children who have lost their parents. To support herself, Kadi runs her own bar, a wooden hut with a concrete floor and a few tables. She sells food she has made to travellers coming from Ouagadougou or miners from the nearby Gangaol gold mine. She has done this kind of work since she was 12, when she first put up a table besides Bani’s main road to serve passers-by.