Micheline Ouedraogo

I'm originally from Burkina Faso, a French-speaking country in West Africa, and I moved to the U.S. in 2014. Growing up, I didn't have people to pay for me to go to school, so I had to work as a housemaid during summer months to save up money to pay for my own tuition. When I came to the United States, I was working at McDonald's making $7.25 an hour while going to school full-time, but helping children back home was on my heart. In 2015, I started sponsoring five orphans to go to school in Burkina Faso. One of them was an 11-year-old girl who had fasted and prayed for four days asking God to provide for her education because her aunt couldn't afford it. At the end of her fourth day of fasting, she was told that someone she didn't know wanted to pay for her to go to school, and that was me. When I heard her story, I knew there were many children in her situation and I needed to do something. Two years later, I met a lady named Susie Duvoir who invited me for coffee, and after I shared the story with her, she decided to join me and sponsor five more orphans. We became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in 2019, and today we have a five-classroom school in Africa that started with 22 students in 2022 and now serves 135 students. The children learn English as a second language and technology on top of the government curriculum because the United States has been really good to me with opportunities, but I had to learn English and computer literacy, and that's what put me where I am today with my career. I believe all children deserve the same opportunities, so when they graduate, the world is open to them. We also work with over 100 women, helping them become financially independent. None of them had bank accounts when we started, and now they all do. We teach them financial literacy, help them grow crops to sell for profit, and run a livestock program where we provide animals as micro-loans. They fatten them up for six to seven months, sell them, give us back our original investment plus 5% of their profit, which we use to add more women to the program. My idea is for the program to become self-sustaining. Professionally, I earned my Bachelor's degree in Accounting and Management Information Systems in 2020. I worked with Ernst & Young for about four years starting in 2021, and now I work with PNC Bank. That's my day job, what pays the bills, so I'm able to give back and help other people. But the nonprofit, Bridges to Burkina, is my calling and my purpose. I even published a book called 'Bridges to Burkina' because everything I do is about my mission and what I'm passionate about.