Place de la nation marketing event

Our marketing event at Place de la Nation was spread out over three days, Friday 26th, Saturday 27th and Sunday 28^th of May. Our purpose there was to sell products created by AVO and to spread awareness of the organisation.

The first day began with an opening ceremony attended by many significant figures, where we and the other stall holders were greeted. Afterwards we all returned to our stalls where news presenters went round and took interviews asking people to  talk about the products they were selling. In our stall we were selling body butter, soap, teedo, moringa, lip butter, water and bissap, all this was possible thanks to our wonderful training sessions that had taken place at AVO. Before this event we had also taken the time to design and add new and attractive labels to our products which required a lot of sticking and packaging!

Many people came from afar to check out the products being sold at the fair; our stall was a great success due to Aina talking the lead role of promoting the AVO products and persuading many people to buy them. Aina spoke about the health benefits of the products; such as the moringa, which we know from our nutrition awareness raising is full of calcium, iron, vitamin A and many more nutrients.

We had the chance to look round the other stalls, which was a thoroughly enjoyable cultural experience, as we were able to see locally made products and find out how they are made, two Brits even sampled ‘dolo’ - non-alcoholic local beer. We also got to meet other charities and even has an awareness raising session on sexual health delivered to us!

One of the Brits brought a bowl which was made from the gourd fruit, and met the woman who made it, she was able to explain the process of making it and told us how she added the intricate flower design with a flame.

After a long, busy three days, we were happy to find out that we made a huge total of 45,600f cfa, which was a great achievement for us and the AVO staff. We hope to continue to achieve such high goals for the rest of our placement.