Our strategic partner, the Close to Africa Foundation, is a Hungarian civil society organization founded in 2019 that primarily helps children and women living in extreme poverty in Rwanda and Mali to catch up. The foundation’s mission is based on the three pillars of “knowing, understanding, helping,” and its goal is to build sustainable communities through education and social support.

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The founder of the Close to Africa Foundation, Andrea Morris, lived in Africa with her family between 2009 and 2013. The most memorable part of her African experience was the period she spent teaching at a school in the Sanfil slum in Bamako. There were no public schools in this neighborhood, so Andrea met many children who were unable to attend school due to their parents’ poverty. In 2012, she came up with the idea of a child support program in Bamako, which has since provided basic education to more than 400 children in parts of the world where there are no free schools.

The essence of the program is that it does not distribute money, but pays tuition fees for needy, talented, hard-working children who are selected on the recommendation of their teachers. The supported schools regularly send the certificates of the children in the program and report on their progress. Representatives of the foundation plan to visit the supported countries annually and visit the children’s families to ensure that the support continues to be used for its intended purpose. The visits are combined with school development programs.

The foundation implements its child support projects in Mali and Rwanda.