As part of La Chaîne de l’Espoir’s support for South-South cooperation in West Africa, La Chaîne de l’Espoir is organizing the transfer of 5 Burkinabe children with heart problems to Senegal, where they will be operated on by Senegalese medical teams at the Centre Cardiopédiatrique Cuomo (CCPC ) in Dakar.

The 5 children, aged between 11 and 16, suffer from complex heart diseases that are impossible to treat in Burkina Faso, and were selected by Prof. Gabriel Ciss, cardiac surgeon at the CCPC, during the first closed-heart surgery mission he led last April alongside Dr. Adama Sawadogo, cardiac surgeon at Ouagadougou’s Tengandogo hospital.

These young patients arrived in Dakar on July 2, accompanied by a relative. They are staying at the Pavillon des Enfants built and opened by La Chaîne de l’Espoir in 2017, with operations scheduled between July 8 and 14. Dr. Sawadogo and an anesthetist from Burkina Faso are also on hand to work alongside the Senegalese team.

Further transfers to the CCPC are planned each month, for a total of 5 patients from Mali, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire… The Engie Foundation, a long-standing partner of La Chaîne de l’Espoir, notably for the construction of the Pavillon des Enfants in Dakar, will finance the care of these patients.

This vast program will be complemented by screening and prevention campaigns for childhood heart disease, notably in Senegal and Mali.

The first campaign will take place this summer, from July 27 to August 3, during which some 30 cardiologists, pediatricians, medical students and paramedics will visit the Ziguinchor region to determine the prevalence of heart disease in a population of a thousand children, and to implement an early prevention strategy and appropriate preventive treatment if necessary.

This program opens up new prospects for our referring physicians, who until now had no choice but to transfer these small patients to France or Europe, at very high cost, with restrictive administrative formalities and therefore a limited number of children.