ABOUT US
A team made up of volunteers only
Our aims
My Future Yemen is a NGO committed to providing access to education for young Yemeni girls. Set up in 2010, this foundation seeks to ensure their schooling to prevent them from marrying young and to help their families understand the importance of education.
Despite the changes that have taken place in Yemeni society over the last 30 years, it is still very hard for girls to receive education, the illiteracy rate of women in rural areas is as high as 75%, and early marriage is still very much an issue.
This situation has been exacerbated by the war currently waged in Yemen: there has been a dramatic drop in the number of children attending school, and the situation of young girls is even more critical.
Our story
The NGO My Future Yemen was set up by Khadija Al Salami (more on Khadija), from Yemen, whose work is acknowledged today the world over.
From a modest, conservative background where girls’ education was frowned upon, and early marriage was considered the only alternative for young girls, Khadija was married off at the age of eleven. However, she managed to divorce soon after and was awarded a scholarship to study in the USA where she began her fight for girls’ rights to independence and education.
Since then, Khadija Al Salami has become the first woman filmmaker in Yemen, with a filmography that has received a multitude of awards throughout the world. She has dedicated her work to the condition of women and young girls in today’s Yemen.
Now resident in France, the creation of My Future Yemen in 2010 marks a new stage in her total commitment to the cause of women and children in Yemen.
Our team
My future Yemen was set up in 2010 by Khadija Al Salami, and its action was reinforced in 2012 when it teamed up with the association Al Baradoni.
Created by Ségolène Blondel Bélier, who taught macroeconomics for 20 years at the university of Paris Dauphine and is passionate about Yemen, the association Al Baradoni* had, up to then, helped and supported underprivileged families in the region of Ibb.
In 2012, after meeting Khadija Al Salami, Ségolène Blondel Bélier decided to support, through Al Baradoni, the action of My Future Yemen and to do everything possible to allow access to education for young girls of impoverished families and to fight against early marriage, while pursuing her association’s initial goal of helping poverty-stricken families.
My Future Yemen has another substantial support in the form of Sheikha Prohaska Alatas, who, for the past thirty years, has been working, painstakingly but discreetly, to support the schooling of hundreds of children all over the world and to help their families to live. Many of these children have since become engineers, architects, lawyers, accountants and teachers. Thanks to her invaluable help, she has given these children a real chance and has transformed their lives. Now adults, they are beneficial both for themselves and for their family and society in the country where they live.
Sheikha continues to make the dreams of many children come true. We are so lucky to count her among us in this struggle against ignorance, inequality and early marriage.
A very efficient local team:
In a country where it is a duty to help one another, My Future Yemen can rely on a local team of highly motivated volunteers, responsible for the logistics and distribution of supplies to children and families. The association has also recruited teachers to give lessons and follow up the schooling and progress of children. These teachers draw up certificates of attendance to justify the continued education of the child.
*Al Baradoni is a reputed Yemeni poet, and a lawyer who defended women’s rights