P.P. Filles – Counselling centre for women
There are no men allowed into this facility. Here women and girls are counselled on issues relating to family planning, sex education, circumcision and HIV/AIDS. We also show educational films and give presentations to increase awareness in the P.P.Filles centre and in various suburbs and schools in Ouagadougou. The counsellors often meet socially deprived women who can be helped by individual or group counselling. In many cases the women are HIV-positive and have been cast out by their families.
Hedwige Ouedraogo, the director of long standing is a sociologist. Together with a psychologist and a social worker they take care of the women’s problems and visit families. Some of the girls can be accommodated in the MIA or ALMA facilities. In 2008 the team conducted 2,500 individual counselling sessions, 245 group discussions and 400 visits to homes and workplaces.
The project was opened on 3rd March 1999 and has moved premises twice since then. This only served to make the project better known. It is now located near the two orphanages and the AMPO-MIA and AMPO-ALMA facilities, in the former soap works. The area is nicely laid out with two small offices for individual counselling and several large multi-purpose rooms for presentations and film shows.
The projector can also run on a generator so it can be used for presentations in locations on the outskirts of town where the electricity supply is not always reliable.
This equipment was procured for the Cinémobile activities organized by P.P.Filles. This mobile cinema travels around the rural areas near Ouagadougou showing educational films, reaching villages up to 150 km distance. Out in the bush people come sometimes 10 km on foot to see a film and in one month we can have as many as 20,000 viewers. Men are allowed to attend outside film presentations too. Many other aid agencies have already emulated the good work of this project.
P.P. Filles working group
From the beginning, P.P.Filles has provided micro credits to groups of women, a practice that has been considerably expanded since 2008. The applicants come from a variety of work backgrounds. They can be rice cooks, hairdressers, fabric traders, ordinary working-class women. They are organized in groups of ten by our sociologist and repay the credit available to each individual as a group. This gives the women the opportunity to start up a small-scale business and thus provide for their families. They are jointly responsible for coping with illness-related absences from work and they undertake to participate in courses on childcare, family planning and education on circumcision and HIV/AIDS. We are proud of the repayment rate of 98%.
P.P. Filles works in close cooperation with the gynaecological unit and with AMPO-MIA and AMPO-ALMA.
