CECI has been working in Africa since our organization’s early days, when we opened our first offices on the continent in 1984.

Today, we have country offices staffed with solid teams of professionals in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal and Guinea. CECI is also present in the three countries of the African Great Lakes region, where we work to combat violence against women, and in Tanzania and Ghana, where we jointly operate our volunteer cooperation program, Uniterra, with our partner World University Service of Canada (WUSC). In 2017, CECI launched a project to support women rice parboilers in Benin.

CECI works to reduce poverty in Africa. Our sectors of involvement include sustainable economic development in rural areas, gender equality, governance, human rights and health. Among our many projects in these countries, we have provided effective support for the shea butter micro-industry and been met with much success. Today, we continue to invest in various economic sectors, such as the the mango and rice industries, and to prioritize gender equality and justice for women and communities who have been victims of conflict.

CECI has been active in Haiti since 1971 and in Central and Latin America since 1990.

Here, we work in fields as varied as sustainable economic development in rural areas, fair trade, agrifood, social tourism and violence prevention. CECI works regionally on issues of governance, citizen and human security and violence prevention. This has led to the creation of an Observatory on National Security Measures that has been officially recognized by the Central American Integration System (SICA, in Spanish) and Central American Heads of State.

CECI has been involved in Nepal for 30 years and in Vietnam for 20, focusing first and foremost on projects supporting economic development, reconstruction and the reduction of risks related to natural disasters caused by climate change. We have also responded to emergency situations in Burma, Pakistan, and the Philippines, where we now support sustainable economic development in rural areas and disaster risk reduction.

CECI partners with national NGOs to strengthen their capacity to respond to a growing number of natural disasters, particularly hurricanes and typhoons in Southeast Asia and in Asia at large. We adhere to international standards, such as Sphere standards, and take part in coordination mechanisms put into place by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and by local governments.