2024 Annual Fundraiser

The most common cause of death in trauma is bleeding, with 90 percent of these deaths globally occurring in Low and Middle Income Countries like Burkina Faso. Survival is closely related to whether or not a person can get to a trauma care center within the ‘Golden Hour’ - 60 minutes. Over the past two years, Pull for Progress has been working to train community members to respond to traumatic injuries at the scene. However, Burkina Faso has no curriculum to train hospital workers how to respond to trauma patients. Our latest program aims to train doctors in a hospital setting on how to most effectively identify and care for traumatic injuries in adults and children.

We recently partnered with the Medical Simulation Skills Institute in Ghana and the Primary Trauma Care foundation to train three of our surgeons from Burkina Faso as the country’s first Primary Trauma Care Program instructors. With these skills, the next phase is to spread this program across hospitals in Burkina Faso. Over the next year these surgeons will be working to implement the Primary Trauma Care curriculum and to integrate this important curriculum into the medical education system

Programs like these are the reason I’m writing today: to ask for your help to raise $30,000 so that Pull for Progress can continue to implement life saving programs like these. Your generosity will go fully towards community-driven programming.

Burkina Faso's humanitarian crisis has escalated to unprecedented levels, with the nation facing a multifaceted emergency. 6.2 million people have been identified as needing urgent humanitarian aid. Since 2016, due to terrorism, political instability, and corruption, 10% of the country’s population have been forced from their homes without anywhere else to go but overcrowded camps. When people are refugees in their own country, they are called “internally displaced persons” (IDPs). Burkina Faso has one of the highest proportions of displacement in Africa. Many of their villages have been burnt down - making it impossible for them to return to and destroying any social safety nets they had. When they fled, they left their households with empty hands as they did not have time to bring anything with them. They have no way to earn an income and they have little access to food or clean water. Threats to women and children include sexual exploitation and trafficking. An education and a job is a far-reaching dream, as over 5,700 schools were closed due to insecurity, depriving more than 800,000 children of education. With the increased focus on security, government funding for our health care programs is limited. As villages lie in ruins and social structures crumble, the path to recovery grows increasingly challenging for Burkina Faso's displaced population.

This is where your support comes in.

Pull for Progress has been creating sustainable solutions since 2015 to help Burkinabe escape from poverty, but right now we have a humanitarian crisis and the urgent need is to keep people alive with food, water, and medical help. We have the ability and connections to get resources directly to those who need it the most – we just need your financial support. Long-term solutions are the goal, but the bleeding still needs a band-aid, and our programs strive to address both.

One of our team members in Burkina Faso said, “When there’s so much corruption and the needs are so high, you feel like giving up. But then I think about all the people suffering - the children, and we just can’t stop.”

Our goal is to raise $30,000 by December 31st so we can send support directly to our team, all from Burkina Faso, who are on the ground in Burkina Faso. You can give towards the goal of $30,000 here today.

Together, we can help our friends in Burkina Faso. With your support, we can help transform their daily struggles into opportunities for growth and recovery, enabling families to move beyond mere survival and restore hope and dignity to those affected by the crisis.

Thank you,

Samy Bendjemil, MD, MPH
Moumini Niaone, MD, MPH
Rina Gandhi, Esq.
Co-founders, Pull for Progress

For more information about our projects, click here.