Welcome to Burkina Faso!

Over the next two weeks, we’ll be bringing you blog posts from a country where children face many challenges: Burkina Faso. A group of our coworkers from IKEA France is visiting UNICEF projects which are funded by our Soft Toys for Education campaign.

Laure Duault, head of corporate partnerships at UNICEF France, tells us more about why our funding is so important: 

Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, in which women and children from rural areas are the most vulnerable to poverty. Burkina Faso is a landlocked country with a high population density. Ground and natural resources are weak and fragile which make the economy extremely vulnerable to external crises, and demographic growth remains a major challenge.

In this context, the support of the IKEA Foundation is essential because education is one of the pillars of development. Burkina Faso’s two mains goals for 2015 are:

• getting every child into school with special focus on vulnerable children.
• ensuring that 75.1 % of children attending primary school will complete their curriculum (in comparison with 41.7% in 2008/2009)

Through its soft toys campaign, IKEA and the IKEA Foundation are key partners in this drive. We are extremely happy to share with IKEA co-workers our daily life during their field trip. They will see how important their support is for the life of children in Burkina Faso!

We thank these ambassadors for speaking on behalf of UNICEF to their customers and colleagues and making our values and work known in this way!