Stories from Sierra Leone: Abdulai's Story

I am the Founder and Executive Director of Pikin-to-Pikin Movement, a national organisation established in 1994 and registered as an NGO in 1998.

The organisation was established during the war years in Sierra Leone. When the war reached Freetown, many children were going missing, so we volunteered to come and try to help find them. We had a centre where we took the children so we could try and reunite them with their families. Those who could not be reunited with their family were cared for at the centre. That’s how we started!

Fast forward to recent years, we came across All We Can through an advertisement stating that they wanted development partners in Sierra Leone. We applied for the partnership; the application process was rigorous. They came to assess the organisation, and we were selected to be one of their Sierra Leonean partners!

The process of becoming a partner involved us completing a strategic development plan. We did lots of consultations, during which we visited all of our operational districts and communities. We talked to the communities we support. We heard their needs, and we gathered the stakeholders in each district. Based on the strategic plan we built off the back of this process, we now have a plan that we’ll work with for the next five years. All We Can supports some of these activities. We also use the strategic plan to produce marketing proposals and seek more funding. This process is helpful because it allows us to look inwards. What can we as an organisation do to strengthen ourselves? If we want to help more communities, we need to be strong as an organisation. We want to reach the unreachable. That’s what we are considering as we expand to more communities and more schools.

 In terms of our work with communities, we have four thematic areas: education, child protection, water sanitation, and health & nutrition. These four themes intersect because we want the schools to be safe, so that the children can go to school, have access to education, access to clean water and toilet facilities, and also be protected from harm and abuse.

One of our biggest challenges is the demand from communities. We get a lot of requests from schools because of the types of programmes we run. They’re expecting us to provide what we have for other schools. But we try and tailor make our programmes so they work for each school.

What we really like about our partnership with All We Can is that we design our programmes and we say what we want to do. It’s not for All We Can to tell us what we have to do. For them, they know that we are the ones who sit with the community and listen to them. We submit our activities based on the communities we support, and All We Can is ready to support us!

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