Interview with Constant Odounfa #OneAfricanChild #Benin #oneafricanleader

Constant Odounfa, promising Leader.

Thanks to the dynamism and the will of each member, OneAfricanChild Foundation has spread wings and crossed more boundaries.

Today we are in Benin with CONSTANT ODOUNFA whose simplicity touches the hearts and souls of each one who approaches him. His Passion and Love for children are the key points of his peace and happiness. His answers to the following questions, as the Representative of Benin, are the proof of unconditional commitment:

1. How did you come to be involve with OAC?
2. What is your personal drive?
3. What is your vision for Benin?
4. What is your vision for Africa?
5. What do we need to care for young people/children?

• I met OAC Founder at a meeting in Accra: the Tech Camp. By connecting to her Facebook profile, I saw that she was involved in an organization named One African Child. I was interested in the actions and the target-people of that non-profit initiative. Victoria Ibiwoye added me to the OAC group, and that’s how all started.

• Become better in each aspect of my life, today than the day before. The growth of my heart and that of children keeps me going on.

• I want my country, Benin, to become a nation that counts in the world even if we are small by area. We don’t have some particular natural resources, but we have many people who become successful intellectual leaders out of the country and don’t come back home. We then need to: i) empower people in the country and make them feel more concerned by the development of their community and ii) bring home our brains outside to work for the country. To achieve those two objectives, we have to aim at only one and same point : increase the performance of our educational system. I believe that once we developed our schools, our colleges and our universities we would more easily reach a sustainable development because the best resources any nation has is its human resources. So, I see Benin become a powerful country with a developed educational system and its children working in agriculture, health, industry, commerce, and others to make those sectors reach the top-level in the world.

• I want to see my continent become a continent of great economic and social achievements, a powerful developed continent where children are leaving in peace. To make it happen, we need to change the whole system. Africa, today, is in jeopardy owing to corruption and bad governance. I am convinced that when Africans change their minds and start conceiving better plans and strategies with concrete objectives and defined actions, the continent will grow in a better way. I would like to work for that, and make my brothers and sisters know that our home continent needs all of us today more than ever. And we need to forget about taking rest, but rather work fully to give our best to the continent. We need to create more enterprises in every field, to develop agriculture by modernising it, to fix the energy issue that all our countries are facing now by promoting solar and wind energies, to create industries to transform our raw materials, to improve our educational system to be able to teach and train our children at home, and more. Africa needs to be built and only us, Africans, can do that.

• We must make sure that they grow in peace, with a good education in every fields and a great self-esteem. Our children need to be looked after and empowered, in order to become leaders of the Africa of tomorrow.

The land in which we live does not belong to us, we borrow it from our children.

We are global citizens, and we work towards the achievement of wellbeing for our community.