About

Burundi young men Christian association (BYMCA) is a nonprofit Christian organization, revived in 2015 by a group of 6 young people, with the permission of the Africa Alliance of YMCAs. The organization stopped operating since 1999 because of the civil war and genocide that was taking place at that time. We started from scratch, with nothing and with no financial support from anybody. We had a desire to bring a positive change in our society, which was facing a lot of challenges, and one of the big challenges was and it still is poverty. For those who don’t know, Burundi is one of the poorest country in the World. The GDP according to the World Bank is $239. For example, a primary school teacher makes $40 a month, that shows how poor Burundi is.

  As young people with no resource, We started by reaching out to children from poor family and the parents by providing basic needs like clothes and food. Later on, we had some friends who donated some funds, and then used it to provide trainings for young people from poor place to build up their skills which will help to fight against poverty.

A year later in 2016, with the help of our friends, we were able to launch our first Summer Youth camp. We had 150 young people attending, and we were able to empower them and change their lives. From that time we never stopped to have that life changing event, we still have it every year with more than 200 campers.

Now, we don’t only have the youth camp as the only activities, we have a Christmas event, a feeding program where we feed more than 40 kids every day, a back to school program where we always provide school materials to more than 200 kids every year, and an orphans care initiative.