‘Our Africa’

Our Africa was an ambitious project which set out to let children across Africa film their lives and countries the way they saw them.

Children filming in Botswana

SOS children are growing up in our families in 45 countries across Africa, and their local communities seemed like a good starting point for the project.

We started off by running a series of workshops with a professional cameraman across the continent teaching a group of local children how to plan, script, shoot and edit a film. As well as skills, the children were left with a camera and video editing equipment, together with a trained local youth leader to maintain a local “filmmakers club”. Each workshop produced a video which the children had created from start to finish. The huge variation in the videos they devised is striking.

At the end of the workshop one or two of the children involved (ranging as young as seven and as old as 23) then took the cameras around their villages and communities, interviewing, talking, showing their lifes and proudly showing off the results to their friends.

In ‘Our Africa’ you can see some of these videos as the children talk about what matters most to them – from games they play; to aspirations they have for jobs; to how they would like things changed fundamentally in their societies (for example how men treat women). They talk about whatever they want to talk about – and, as a result, we’ve been privileged to have collated a collection of videos which you need to look through and judge for yourself.

Whether you’re exploring Africa for the first time, or whether you’re a seasoned traveller there we hope you feel as privileged as we do to be invited into these children’s world.

‘Our Africa’ celebrates the 40th anniversary of SOS Children’s work in the continent. As we visit more and more of the 50+ countries, and speak with still more children, the site will evolve. So we hope you’ll revisit it occasionally and see what’s new. Meanwhile, if you’d like to see more of what we do around the globe you’d be welcome on our website at: www.soschildren.org