The Global Happiness report was released in March this year announcing a leaderboard of 156 countries rated on a variety of indicators including GDP, social support and life expectancy. Finland took the envious first place position, making headlines around the world as the ‘happiest country’. At the bottom of the list and barely mentioned was Burundi, the unhappiest.

A small landlocked country in east Africa with a population of 11 million, it’s the second most densely populated country in the continent. It’s where I was born and where I continue to call home, but it’s also a country many people have never heard of.

There’s no denying that life for most people is hard. In 2017, Burundi ranked at the bottom of the Global Food Security Index.  Nearly two thirds of children are malnourished; many are visibly weak, stunted. Malnutrition isn’t a hidden endemic, it’s a tangible thing that you see every day living in Burundi on the faces of those around you.

Despite the huge level of need, Send a Cow – the charity that I work for – is one of the very few international NGOs working in the country right now. While there are some organisations supporting refugees on the border, Send a Cow supports rural families still in their homes, the families who experience poverty and hunger every day. These people are quietly living on the fringes of society, isolated and forgotten.

I’ve seen firsthand how, with the right support, these families can transform their lives and become self-sufficient, making poverty and hunger a thing of the past. Send a Cow recently finished a three year project where we trained rural Burundian families in sustainable agriculture, business skills and gender equality. The results were incredible and illustrate just how determined and hardworking these families are. On average, farmers were earning just 30 cents a day. By the end of the project, they were earning an average of $2.90 and eating a varied diet.

One of the people in the project was Bonaventure (pictured) who once struggled to feed his family and send his children to school. After three years training and support with Send a Cow he is self-sufficient and doing better than he ever imagined. With the farming and business skills he learnt from Send a Cow, he is growing a wide range of crops which his family eat and sell, generating a vital income. With that money he bought livestock and solar panels so his children can do their homework at night. He also invested in a sewing machine and opened a small shop which acts as both a tailors and a tea shop. He told us: “The training helped me change my mindset, and taught me new techniques…We kept our spirits up, and waited for the time when we could realise our dreams.”

That project has now come to an end and people like Bonaventure now have the skills, knowledge and confidence to thrive without our support. But Send a Cow’s presence in Burundi can’t end there; not when so many more families are struggling to survive.

That’s why we’ve launched Burundi: The Forgotten Country, a new campaign to support our work in Burundi. The money raised will enable us to help even more families like Bonaventure’s to transform their lives whilst raising awareness of the country itself and the issues people living there face. Together we can remember Burundi and help its people to live healthier and happier lives. To find out more or to support the campaign visit www.sendacow.org