Educate girls and fight poverty in Senegal

Women’s Global is proud to report that more than one-third of our scholars finished at the top of their class after the year-end exams for school year 2008!

During Senegal’s summer/harvest school break, Women’s Global provided an Educational Vacation Program for scholars to give them extra academic tutoring and to keep them from getting drawn into hard domestic or agricultural labor. We had a successful summer program, with 36 elementary students and 25 high school students participating. Average daily attendance was around 98 percent, which is an increase from the previous year. The girls got tutoring in their weakest subject areas to better prepare them for the 2009 school year.

For 2009, we were able to add nine elementary school scholarships and 10 high school scholarships, bringing our total number of Senegal scholars to 79. We were also pleased to see positive effects from our community awareness program to help families grasp how educating their daughters—a low priority for many poor Senegalese families—provides them with long-term and effective tools for escaping poverty. The number of girls attending school is increasing in rural villages where we work, and in five of the schools where we have scholars, the number of girls now slightly exceeds that of boys!

Your support enables us to provide these invaluable scholarships and programs to our girls and their families, who along with the majority of rural families in Senegal are struggling with the rising costs of living expenses brought on by the global recession. Without these scholarships, these families would not be able to afford to send their daughters to school. You are making a difference—thank you for your support!

We are very proud of our Senegal scholars, all of whom passed their recent end-of-year exams and moved on to the next grade-level! Many Senegalese girls who do get a chance to enroll in school often drop out prematurely because they found their grade-level exams too difficult, their families run out of funds to pay their school fees, they become sick with a preventable illness such as food poisoning or malaria, or they become engaged to marry and to start a family. The success of our scholars was enabled by support programs such as our after-school tutoring and mentoring program and our health education program, which have helped address barriers that keep girls from staying and doing well in school.

We also found a marked increase in the number of resident girls attending school after a specific community participates in one of our girls’ education awareness programs. Thank you for your support!