Angela McKenzie speaks with Molly Melching, the Founder and Executive Director of the Senegal based, non-governmental organization Tostan and her colleagues Malick Diagne and Oureye Sall.
In 1974, when American-born Molly Melching traveled to Senegal as an exchange student from the University of Illinois, she did not realize that she would fall in love with Senegal's people, language and culture and in turn make a lifetime commitment to educating and empowering under-served Senegalese communities. With a team of local cultural specialists, Molly established programs to develop and implement community-led initiatives that respectfully engaged communities in the process by working in their own language and using traditional methods of learning.
Since then, Tostan has grown to serve more nations on the African continent and tackles issues such as the promotion of grass roots democracy, ending child forced marriage, protecting the Talibe children who beg in the streets in exchange for lessons at Qur'anic schools and abandoning female genital cutting as a purification and coming of age ritual.
Malick Diagne who leads the initiative "Child Protection: The Talibe Project" will speak at length about Tostan's role in helping to eliminate the exploitation of the Talibe children and Oureye Sall, a former practitioner of female genital cutting will talk about the horror and the history associated with this ritual and about her current position as an advocate against the practice.
By popular demand, this program is taken from the first season archives of "Initiative Radio with Angela McKenzie."
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