Support Mali's Vulnerable Children

Construction on A Child for All’s new Community Library and Computer Lab at the ACFA Zorokoro Children’s Complex is almost complete! This will be a great resource not only for the children at ACFA, but for the entire community!

This quarter we welcomed several new members to our Board of Directors, bringing a wealth of nonprofit and international experience. They have already contributed significantly to updating our policies and procedures and have great ideas on how to keep ACFA moving forward. We also are looking forward to working with our new grant writer and volunteer executive director!

We also welcomed new children to Zorokoro in March and April and hope to have a few more children soon at which point we will be at full capacity in the portion of the dormitory at the ACFA Zorokoro Children’s Complex with a total of 25 children ages 3-7 years old. Please help us to build out the rest of the dormitory so we can take in 100 vulnerable children.

Our Operations Manager in Mali, Amadou Traoré, continued hosting visitors to the ACFA Zorokoro Children’s Complex, and engaged in multiple community outreach events. We are grateful for the partnerships and continue building support with local organizations to help vulnerable children in Mali. One growing relationship is with the American International School of Bamako (AISB). Our teenagers are working with them to paint murals at both schools, while the AISB students visited our younger children at Zorokoro where they toured the school, played with the kindergarten students, and taught the first graders how to count in English with flash card games!

Three of the older children, Diakassan, Billy, and Saleh, attended the Open Epee fencing tournament organized by the Federation National d’Escrime along with our operations manager Amadou Traoré. The competition was in Koulikoro, a one hour drive out of Bamako, and was organized by the National Fencing Federation. Diakassan won a gold medal! We believe sports are an opportunity to build leadership, confidence, work ethic, healthy habits, and team building skills. It is for this reason that we are so proud of Diakassan's dedication to fencing! Generous donors are helping us build a basketball court at Zorokoro, giving our children and the local community further opportunities for sport.

A Child for All is grateful to all our supporters and we are excited about what 2023 will bring. We are proud to help vulnerable children in Mali and to be able to provide them with high-quality holistic support services. While we continue to build out our personnel infrastructure, we are continuing to develop our programs. We are focused on sustainability, in terms of funding and also in terms of creating a program that supports the environment, equality and inclusion, and helps the wider Malian community.

Thank you all so much for your support. We will continue to build on our successes!
Please consider donating to ACFA today to support our continued growth and enable more vulnerable children to receive what all kids deserve: care, safety, and opportunity. Thank you for your generous and continued support of ACFA.

Links:

• WEbsite

We are growing!

This fall, we were excited to hold the official inauguration of our new elementary school building for grades 1-3 at the ACFA Zorokoro Children's Complex! So this academic year, we have two kindergarten classes and a first grade class. The classes host both ACFA children and children from the surrounding villages. ACFA now provides education and nutritious food to over 70 children as all the children attending the Complex school are fed three meals a day.

In late 2022, we also increased our capacity as we took in more toddlers ages 3 to 5 years old from the street and they are now calling ACFA’s Zorokoro Children’s Complex home. Additionally, they are all attending the Zorokoro Children’s Complex school. In the next few weeks, more children will become part of the ACFA family at Zorokoro.

The older children who have been in ACFA’s care since 2010, who are now teenagers, continue to live in Bamako where they attend school and practice sports. They love to visit Zorokoro to spend time with their new brothers and sisters. Three of these teenagers are in high school, one is still in middle school, and the others are enrolled in vocational training schools studying tailoring, livestock, accounting, construction, cooking, pastry and baking.

Our teenage girls, Astan, Diakassan, Kadiatou, Koro and Awa, took part in UNIFY 2022, an event sponsored by non-profit Kickoff Solutions which provides scholarships for impoverished girls to participate in sports, build confidence, and receive mentorship. Four of the ACFA girls are scholarship recipients. All the girls traveled with ACFA Founder and CEO Kadiatou to Bhubaneswar, India in October to attend workshops on team building, being independent, promoting change through sports for development, community engagement and more. Despite language barriers, ACFA girls, who were the only non-Indian scholarship recipients, made friends with the other scholarship recipients and enjoyed learning about another country’s culture.

At the Zorokoro Children Complex, construction of the community library and computer lab continues! This will be a great resource not only for the children at ACFA, but also for the entire community. We are grateful to B2Gold for funding this project. Thanks to USAID/ASHA, commodities purchase for the library and computer lab including books in English, French and Bambara, computer equipment, etc. continues.

In addition to a new first grade teacher, we also welcomed Amadou Traore as our new Operations Manager in Mali. Amadou joined ACFA with field experience in community development, management of education programs and adult training. He has over 30 years of experience managing education, positive youth, community development programs and teachers training in Peace Corps, Save the Children, OXFAM and most recently retired from USAID in Mali. Fluent in French and English, Amadou oversees operations both at the Bamako Children’s Home and the Zorokoro Children’s Complex and is engaging with donors and the community on behalf of ACFA.

ACFA founder and CEO Kadiatou Sidibe visited operations in Mali this fall. She oversaw the progress of the construction of the community library and computer lab, engaged with partners and community members, and supported Amadou in his first days on the job. She also travelled with the girls to India for UNIFY 2022. Kadiatou and Amadou hosted many visitors to the ACFA’s Zorokoro Children’s Complex, including ambassadors, ministers, existing and potential donors, and volunteer groups. We are thankful for their partnerships and work to continue to build more support with local organizations for the vulnerable children of Mali. A special thank you to everyone who brought in-kind donations, including the U.S. Marine Corps stationed at the U.S. Embassy who visited the ACFA children and generously donated toys for the holidays.

A Child for All is grateful to all its supporters and is proud of everything we have accomplished this past year. We know from our work on the ground in Mali, that there are many more vulnerable children in need of the kind of high-quality holistic support services that we provide. We hope to expand our capacity by building more personnel infrastructure and continuing to develop our programs. In 2023, thanks to your support, we will continue to build on our successes!

Please consider donating to ACFA today to support our continued growth and enable more vulnerable children to receive what all kids deserve: care, safety, and opportunity.

Thank you for your generous and continued support of ACFA.