Burkina Faso is the epicenter of one of the world's least-reported humanitarian crises. Behind every statistic is a child who lost everything — and is waiting for someone to notice.
Be honest — had you heard much about Burkina Faso before today? Could you find it on a map? Most people can't. It sits in West Africa, just north of Ghana, landlocked in the heart of the Sahel. And it is the stage for a humanitarian catastrophe that the wider world has almost entirely overlooked.
Since an Islamist insurgency took hold in 2015, layered violence, mass displacement, and deepening hunger have unravelled ordinary life across much of the country. More than six million people — roughly a third of the population — now need humanitarian assistance, and over half the national territory operates beyond meaningful government control.
These are not abstractions. They are families torn apart, villages emptied overnight, and — at the center of it all — children. Children who survive attacks only to emerge from hiding and find that every adult they knew is gone. This page lays out the scale of the need we exist to answer.
Armed groups affiliated with al-Qaeda (JNIM) and the Islamic State (IS Sahel Province) have waged a campaign of attacks on villages, schools, markets, and places of worship. Whole communities have been blockaded or burned; thousands of civilians have been killed. The result is one of the fastest-growing displacement crises on earth.
When families flee, children are the most exposed. In the chaos of displacement, the young are separated from parents, orphaned by violence, or surrendered by families who can no longer feed them. Conflict creates orphans. Poverty creates orphans. Desperation creates orphans.
Children carry the heaviest weight of this crisis. Of the millions in need of humanitarian aid, more than three million are children — and a generation of them is growing up amid violence, hunger, and the loss of the people meant to protect them.
For an orphaned or separated child, the dangers compound quickly: exploitation, trafficking, child labour, early marriage, and recruitment by armed groups. A child alone in a crisis zone is a child at risk every single day. That is precisely the gap Haven Harbor Heritage is built to close — to be the family, the safety, and the future these children have lost.
Conflict has collapsed farming, markets, and trade routes, and blockaded towns have been cut off from food for months at a time. Hunger now stalks children across the country — and for the youngest, malnutrition is not just a hardship but a threat to life.
A child in survival mode cannot learn, cannot heal, and cannot grow. That is why our first promise to every child who comes through our doors is the most basic one of all: three meals a day, and the security to stop worrying about the next one.
Schools have become targets. Teachers have been threatened and killed, and classrooms have been forced shut across vast stretches of the country. For a generation of children, the path out of poverty — an education — has simply been closed.
Education is where disadvantage becomes advantage. Restoring it — with real teachers, a real curriculum, and the chance to learn how to think — is at the very center of what we are building.
What makes this crisis so dangerous is not only its scale, but its silence. It rarely makes the news. It rarely makes the budget. Humanitarian organizations have repeatedly named Burkina Faso among the world's most neglected displacement crises — and the funding gap proves the point.
In 2024, the United Nations' humanitarian response plan for Burkina Faso — nearly one billion dollars — was only about 17% funded halfway through the year. The need is enormous. The attention, and the money, are not arriving. That invisibility is part of why Haven Harbor Heritage had to act.
We can't end a war or reverse a famine. But for the children in our care, we can change everything. A safe home. Three meals a day. An education that opens doors across the world. And the one thing no statistic can measure — the feeling of belonging to a family again.
The crisis is vast. Our promise to each child is specific: you are safe here.
Figures reflect the most recent reporting available at time of writing and are drawn from UNICEF, UN OCHA, OHCHR, UNHCR, and WFP/Cadre Harmonisé analyses. Child-protection and nutrition figures (orphaned and abandoned children; under-five acute and severe malnutrition) are sourced from UNICEF and IPC humanitarian analyses; the underlying agency reports should be cited directly in any formal or grant context. Statistics are updated as new humanitarian assessments are published.