In September 2018, OMPT traveled to Burkina Faso to implement a workshop with UNICEF partners. Matt and I were on the ground in the capital city, Ouagadougou (pronounced Wagoo) to facilitate the workshop. Burkina Faso is an entirely French speaking country, but luckily our Local Video Trainers were fluent in both French and English.

While we wait for our coworkers to get back and tell us all about their time in Burkina Faso and with UNICEF, we thought it might be a good time to share some photos from our most recent workshop. If you weren’t aware, OMPT traveled to Burkina Faso in West Africa to host a Video Education Workshop with UNICEF where we trained several different NGOs on video production.

As we are traveling to Burkina Faso next week, we thought it might be a good time to look into the culture and history of the nation. Like other West African countries, Burkina Faso has been inhabited since approximately 14,000 BC. Nomadic tribes still travel the nation’s northern regions and traditional religious ceremony remains an important element of day-to-day life. As one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world, Burkina’s cultural identity is as varied as it is vibrant.

Burkina Faso

A great thing about working in Burkina Faso, since we’ve been there before, is the familiarity with the landscape. Normally some of your brain is working towards getting the lay of the land, trying to figure out what the local customs are (in some places you can’t put your feet up with the bottom facing people, in other places you can’t refer to a certain period of time because it was marked by a violent revolution) so it’s always nice to be someplace where your brain power can be focused on building relationships.

Partnering with UNICEF (United Nations International Fund for Children), we will be returning to Burkina Faso at the end of September. As you may remember from our July newsletter, this trip was originally scheduled for mid-summer but had to be postponed. While this is our second time traveling to Burkina Faso, this will be our first time working with UNICEF. We are incredibly excited for the opportunity to work with an organization as large and influential as UNICEF and look forward to future partnerships.