L'Amade
The AMADE plenary conference was held on the 26th and 27th April 2017, an opportunity for the association to bring together its network of partners in the Principality in order to exchange information about their programmes for children, their methods, and the launch of new initiatives.
At the opening of this conference, AMADE's Board of Directors, under the chairmanship of HRH The Princess of Hanover, wished to renew its support for a number of programmes in 2017, such as the protection of children accused of witchcraft and the demobilization of children associated with armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, access to secondary education for girls in Burundi and the protection and reintegration of unaccompanied migrants minors in Italy and in Germany.
Since 2013, when its new intervention strategy was adopted, AMADE has mobilized a total of €2,076,383 to support some 20 programmes in various fields including the protection of children against violence, exploitation and abuse, access to education, access to health, and in the fields of emergency assistance for refugee children and victims of natural disasters. These programs directly benefit nearly 50,000 children.
Beyond the current programs, AMADE's Board of Directors wished to strengthen its intervention in the access to education field by initiating a pilot project on access to digital education in Burundi. This program, which will be deployed in partnership with the NGOs Libraries Sans Frontières (www.bibliosansfrontieres.org) and BRCK (www.brck.com), flagship of the Kenyan silicone valley, will make it possible to introduce to Burundi access to digital education in the excellent college administered over by AMADE Burundi and a network of primary schools near the college. In a country where access to content and teacher training remain a challenge, the technological solutions identified, which are currently being used successfully in Anglophone Africa, should significantly improve the quality of education in the coming months.
A second commitment was declared: to respond to the appeal made by women in the IDPs camp in Mungote, North Kivu to the President of AMADE last September regarding their living conditions, specifically their intimate hygiene. After consultations with UNHCR, AMADE will thus introduce a privacy unit within the camp, using local raw materials and based on a manufacturing technology initiated by Technology for Tomorrow (T4T) in Uganda . Access to these protected units will be combined with a project to promote access to education for girls.
In Niger, a country neglected by many operators, AMADE will strengthen its partnership by financing the construction of 8 classrooms and the renovation of 4 classrooms.
AMADE's Plenary Conference brought together AMADE's implementation partners in order to share their experiences and practices, and to welcome and listen to beneficiaries' testimonies. This year it was based on three workshops:
Education: Access to quality education Emergency and Post-Emergency: Isolated migrant minors Protection: Street children and children living in prisons
These exchanges allowed for the occasion to receive the courageous testimony of the young Cookie. A Filipino girl, and product of the street, Cookie's childhood had involved drugs and she suffered abuse. A former beneficiary of the Acay association's School of Life programme, Cookie completed her Management Studies and is now an employee of the association. These two days filled with exchanges also allowed for the occasion to receive the testimony of the photographer William Dupuy, who recently return from the D.R. Congo where he was mandated by AMADE to conduct photographic portraits of child beneficiaries of the projects supported by the association, including youth recruited by armed groups. These photographic portraits will be on exhibition in the Principality in 2017. Noella Coursaris, President and Founder of the Malaika Foundation (www.malaika.org), shared with the partners of AMADE her commitment to girls' education in the D.R. Congo, a country she is rediscovering after an international career in the world of fashion.
To conclude, AMADE wished to pay tribute to the work of the director, Sébastien Maitre, for his recent short film "Debout Kinshasa" that tells the story of little Samuel, who can not return to his school because of his lack of shoes, uses his ingenuity - including the famous article 15! - to find ways to get around the issue in order to find his way back to the school benches.