We were in the middle of preparing for the budget orientation debates at the Fongolimbi town hall. Indeed, as part of the advocacy for gender-sensitive budgeting, we were preparing the directories of the Youth Councils of Fongolimbi to plead for reproductive health themes close to their hearts. It was then that I was approached:
“Yes, this is important,” Ndeye Astou Diallo, the president of the girls’ club in Fongolimbi, a village perched in the heights of Kédougou and nearly inaccessible, 28 km from the city of Kédougou, told me. She is 17 years old, in her final year of high school, has dreams in her eyes, and a conviction that the young girls of Fongolimbi have rights just as men do, almost a blasphemy in this highly patriarchal Peul community of nearly 10,000 inhabitants. Ndeye Astou has this almost supernatural ability to represent what she defends. When we were installing the MLL (Mobile Learning Lab) in her village and going through the content on the solar-powered tablets because there is no electricity in Fongolimbi, she had ironically stated: “You’re going to make people happy…” with a wry smile.
When my volunteer colleague Oscar asked her why she said that, she replied, “I am a survivor of forced marriage, because of my refusal I was ostracized by my family and village but I fought back, with the help of my mother and we held on together, today I am preparing for the BAC. I will get it, God willing.”
“Yes, it’s important,” she said as if repeating to herself, then looking at me with her huge ever-alert crystalline eyes… “But it won’t be enough, Uncle Papi* (that’s the name the children have given me in Kédougou). We don’t have teachers, we are severely lacking. It’s untenable, we must do something. What do you suggest, Uncle Papi?”
This is probably one of the biggest impacts of Crossroads International through the DAMCAM (My Voice My Health) project in the Kédougou region; strong young girls, aware of the stakes and determined to fight for their rights. My proudest achievement is that we have trained young people like Ndeye Astou. When the project was implemented in Kédougou, she was just 13 years old, but the DAMCAM team transformed these young girls into real exceptions. They have become references, agents of development in their community.
Today, Ndeye Astou is sought after everywhere to help with women’s empowerment. She is asking Action Senegal, a Spanish NGO, for sewing machines for the out-of-school girls of Fongolimbi. She is president of the Spanish club, treasurer, and Minister of Equity and Education in the school government. In this capacity, she had registered the activities of the school government in 2022 under the banner of the fight against early pregnancies. She leads fundraising activities to support the menstrual hygiene care of young girls in the Kédougou region. Every week, she gathers young girls between 10 and 19 years old to carry out awareness activities on reproductive health and children’s rights at the Fongolimbi young girls’ club under DAMCAM.
I didn’t have a good answer, but a few years ago, no young girl would have dared to ask this kind of question in public. On the day of the debate in front of the prefect; the mayor and the assembled councilors, including her own parents; Ndeye Astou spoke up and asked the adults to act in favor of children and made a plea for greater attention to education issues in her community because, she says: to educate is, above all, to protect.
Mouhamadou Diallo, Volunteer Advocacy and Resource Mobilization Advisor
Senegal, 2024