Off the beaten track: Multi-Service Community-based Spaces in Burkina Faso
This is a story about how youth led community engagement and building bonds with women drive Social Change in Burkina Faso.
Sana Oumarou, a young volunteer from Ouagadougou, developed databases enabling young people to list children due for their first dose of vaccine or those needing to be registered in civil records within the prescribed timeframes.
In the field in Saba, his colleague Sayouba Sawadogo conducted home visits to converse with mothers in his village and record data about their children in the community register. By listening to the women, Sayouba and his fellow volunteers quickly built a bond of trust with them. They confided that they faced numerous obstacles limiting their children’s access to healthcare and administrative documents. They also shared with them a wish: to find an alternative to their home visits, which were insecure given the current context of the country.
For the past two years, the Social and Behavioral Change (SBC) team of UNICEF in Burkina Faso has been exploring radically new ways of collaborating with young people and women to realize children’s right to health and identity.
Sana Oumarou Bade and Sayouba Sawadogo, along with Traore Khepa Kady, Salimata Compaoré, and Boulou Ahoua, are among these youth who contribute to improving children’s access to routine immunization and birth registration in Burkina Faso. They shared with us the story of their commitment to social change.
Formerly U-reporters[1], these volunteers self-organized to act as a group, setting up a community-based baby-tracking system to identify children at risk of slipping through the cracks of healthcare and civil registration systems.
Volunteers take on various roles such as community monitoring database manager, immunization specialists, birth registration facilitators, or even female entrepreneurship coaches, while supporting women’s community engagement activities. They provide many services in their community, demonstrating a high level of community engagement and social innovation on the U-report social change continuum.[2].
In response to the needs expressed by the women who wanted to discuss this with them in an open, safe place, volunteers co-created with them the Multi-Service Community-based Spaces (MCS), a service that encourages their utilization of existing basic social services.
Given freely by the chief of a village or neighborhood, MCS belong to all women in the community. They are located under a tree, in a schoolyard, an empty space, etc. They are easily accessible to all women (pregnant, breastfeeding, young girls) without discrimination.
These informal places have become valuable spaces for dialogue between women and volunteers. Women can thus access free support to facilitate their access to a range of integrated, preventive, and promotional services (birth registration, routine vaccination, nutritional advice for mothers with children, production of enriched flour to prevent malnutrition, advice on preventing the three biggest killers of children (malaria, acute respiratory infections, and diarrhea), just a few steps from their homes in poorly served semi-urban and rural areas around Ouagadougou.
To date, 43 localities have set up MCS. This approach is community-based, under the leadership of traditional chiefs. Each time, the initiative adjusts agilely to its community environment. “It’s the community that teaches us,” says Oumarou. The spaces are never the same. Neither are the services offered. “Each MCS has its own story,” says Ahoua. Income-generating activities were not initially planned. Women requested them. New activity proposals emerge based on different local realities. Where there are internally displaced persons, women express the need to go to school. This is far from the “standard package.”
Volunteers demonstrate skills in active listening, dialogue, and problem-solving. Their action goes beyond raising awareness; young people have been able to establish a trusting relationship with those in charge of technical state services, notably health centers and civil registry services, facilitating children’s access to various services.
It is thanks to local resources and strengths that MCS exist. Social capital more than financial. Volunteers work in the villages where they grew up and where they are known.
What is impressive is less their number than their mindset and the quality of social ties. The values underpinning the MCS are based on selflessness. Not per diem.
A frank discussion about the values underlying youth engagement certainly helped reduce numbers, but also ensured authentic engagement. Those who are still there stayed out of “love for what they do,” as Salimata puts it.
The young people who run the MCS are proud of the deep connection they developed with women. “We receive confidences that women don’t tell the health district personnel,” notes Oumarou. They constantly receive testimonials of appreciation and recognition from their respective communities. Sayouba shows the outfit he received from a woman. MCS operates in a relational economy marked by non-monetary rewards.[4]
The MCS in Ouagadougou and its surroundings illustrate that it is possible to approach work with young people and women differently. Flexible programming focused on dialogue and listening to community groups has fostered the emergence of a distinctive service[5] which combines community engagement and service design. This shows that inviting and listening to community groups, and valuing and building on local resources, could be conditions for the emergence of endogenous community initiatives as no one has yet imagined.
We welcome any suggestions you have related to this essay (Feel free to comment here, or you can give inputs in our online “suggestion basket.” Our motto: Always. Be. Learning (ABL). UNICEF West and Central Africa Regional Office, Social and Behaviour Change team, in collaboration with UNICEF Burkina Faso and partners.
[1] U-report is a digital community used by young people. For more information on U-report, visit the Global U-report site. Global U-Report site
[2] The continuum of youth engagement for social change, presented in the Pocket Guide to U-report for Social Change, helps visualize the roles played by young people engaged in civic action and the social significance of their activities. Pocket Guide: U-Report for Social Change
[3] Table from Pocket Guide to U-Report for Social Change, p.5.
[4] In his book Afrotopia, Professor Felwine Sarr uses the concept of relational economy to describe this kind of exchange and giving. Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia — Reinventing Africa (French Edition) Paperback — March 10, 2016, Philippe Rey (Editor), p.154.
[5] The 2023 annual narrative report from UNICEF’s Burkina Faso office calls CMSS a social innovation. RAM-Burkina Faso
