Capacity that stays after we leave.
A project that leaves nothing behind has not finished. Volunteering with BADEF means putting a specific skill alongside a district team in Lower Juba or Lower Shabelle, and leaving that skill behind when you go.
Seven
2 regions, 4 districts
These are the seven programme areas BADEF actually runs work in. Telling us which one your experience sits in is more useful to us than a general offer of help.
Food security & livelihoods
Helping families produce and earn enough to stay put, through agriculture, small enterprise and coastal work.
Basic health services
Access to essential care where clinics are distant, under-staffed or were never rebuilt after the war.
Gender balance & mainstreaming
Making sure women and girls shape programmes rather than merely receive them, at every level of the work.
Water, sanitation & hygiene
Boreholes, safe water points and sanitation, with the local committees that keep them working after handover.
Community mobilisation
Building the capacity of local committees and staff, because the structures we leave behind decide what lasts.
Education
Keeping children in school through displacement and drought, and equipping the teachers who stay.
Environmental protection
Protecting the land, water and grazing that livelihoods here depend on, and slowing the damage drought accelerates.
Not sure where you fit? Read how projects begin, or where we work, and say what you do in your own words.
Three things worth knowing.
Local capacity comes first
Self-reliance is our stated exit condition, and capacity is meant to stay local. That shapes who we look for: a volunteer matters most where a specific skill is genuinely missing, not where it duplicates one the community already has.
Projects start from named needs
Projects emanate from the needs a local community expresses, in their own order of priority. Placements follow live project needs rather than a standing roster, so both the skills we need and the timing will change.
Some roles require checks
Much of our work brings staff into contact with children and with survivors of gender-based violence. Any role involving that contact requires appropriate checks before a placement is confirmed.
Tell us what you can do.
Tell us what you can do, where you are, and roughly how much time you have. The subject is set to Careers or volunteering so it reaches the right people. Everything sent here is read by the team.