History

The origins of the organisation go back to 1995 when one of our Trustees, Aidan de Brunner, was studying in Spain and where he met our local partner Eugene Kabore. Over the next 10 years they collaborated informally on small scale poverty alleviation projects in Burkina Faso but it became progressively clearer that much more could and should be done.

dBB (the predecessor organisation to the Burkina Health Foundation) was incorporated in 2006 and was initially focused on poverty alleviation, specifically on developing an integrated village project for the village of Seguere 50 km to the north west of Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second city. This is a rural village of approximately 10,000 inhabitants that suffers from abject levels of poverty and where Eugene still has family.  We undertook a needs assessment across training, health, water and sanitation and as a first step following this study sunk a 100m borehole to tap potable water in the natural aquifers which was then pumped by solar power to an accessible reservoir.

However, having delivered this first piece of the project we could see that for the project to properly succeed it would require moving forward simultaneously on all fronts and with our limited resources this was not going to be possible. We had reached the conclusion that we needed to focus our efforts.

During this period we were getting strong feedback through our local partner of the community need for additional healthcare facilities. This came at a time when one of our Trustees, Dr Covadonga Bascaran, had moved from clinical practice to public health and we felt very strongly that healthcare provision was where we should be focusing as we now had the full expertise to maximise our contribution.

In 2011 we committed to work with our local partner and his community to help build, equip and operate a large scale second level health facility in Bobo Dioulasso. In 2013 we changed the name of the organisation to the Burkina Health Foundation to better reflect this focus and to start positioning ourselves as a partner in health with other NGOs and health organisations. In 2013 we also made the first of our scholarship awards for specialist medical training and this program continues to grow.

We obtained our operating licence from the Ministry of Health in September 2015 under a 5 year agreement and opened in late 2015.

The focus of the next 2 years is to prove the model works, that by training the local community and leveraging partnerships we can create a long term, sustainable healthcare model.

Through the course of the next 2 years we will also be developing an outreach programme into neighbouring villages, using the hospital as a hub for primary healthcare service delivery. This will materially increase the number of people that we will be able to reach.