By Tara Boyle
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- In the dusty Matam region of northern Senegal, where the sands of the Sahara desert blow down from Mauritania, residents of the town of Polel Diaobé recently took to the streets in what may have been the community's first protest. Students, teachers, and village leaders of all ages marched through the town, united in a common goal: expressing their unhappiness at the recent marriage of a 10-year-old girl to a much older man.

"They carried signs [saying], ‘Parents, have pity on our girls. We want to go to school... Please stop child marriage,'" recalled Molly Melching, the executive director of a Senegalese nongovernmental organization, Tostan, which works in Polel Diaobé.

In the end, residents were successful in their protest. The marriage was annulled, and the girl will be allowed to return to school. The result was also a success for Tostan, which has worked in more than 1,500 villages across Senegal, teaching communities about human rights, leadership, and other critical issues. In each of the villages, says Tostan Deputy Director Malick Diagne, residents learn how to confront and resolve their own problems.

"When we come to a village, one of the first modules that is taught in the class is problem solving. We try to get them to visualize how they want to be and what are the obstacles to reaching that ideal state," Diagne said.

One of the most frequently discussed obstacles to that "ideal state" is the tradition of female genital cutting (FGC). To date, more than 1,360 Senegalese villages that have participated in the Tostan program have held public declarations to announce that they will no longer engage in FGC or child marriage, which many villagers say are inherently linked traditions.

The Tostan strategy has been so successful that Melching and Diagne predict that FGC may be completely abandoned in Senegal within the next six years. Now, Tostan is taking the lessons it has learned in Senegal and is seeking to replicate them in neighboring Guinea, where nearly 99 percent of women are estimated to have undergone FGC.

"People are comfortable with doing excision (FGC) in Guinea. In Senegal they have to hide it now to do it," said Diagne. "We have changed the mentality...in such a way that it is not cool or politically correct to do excision [in Senegal]. In Guinea we and other [non-governmental organizations] have to work at changing that kind of atmosphere, that kind of prejudice."

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), FGC is practiced in at least 28 African countries and in some parts of Asia and the Middle East. The practice, which varies from region to region, is defined as any procedure to remove part or all of the female external genitalia. The WHO and other public health advocates have warned that FGC can result in hemorrhages, shock, urine retention, infection and death. Long-term consequences can range from cysts and abscesses to difficulty with childbirth.

The Tostan strategy for addressing this practice, Melching says, is to work with intra-marrying communities that traditionally perform FGC as a rite of passage to adulthood. After going through the Tostan program, these villages usually make a collective public declaration to end FGC.

"It's extremely important for marriageability reasons that people do the public declaration, and that the declaration be a collective decision so that people can end FGC safely knowing that their daughters will have more secure futures. Without the public declaration, the girl will be shunned, rejected, she will not be respected, and then she won't find a husband," Melching explained.

Equally important to the Tostan model is the concept of self-empowerment, said Melching.

"We don't go at all into a village to get them to end FGC. That is not our goal...our goal is to help villagers improve their own lives, to define their own goals and achieve their own objectives, and along the way, if they see this is something that could improve their lives, we support them in that decision, but they are the ones who lead that movement," she said.

The Tostan initiative in Guinea is being funded by a three-year, $1.8 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The program, which will be in place in 120 villages by 2005, is part of a larger USAID project to increase democratic and civic participation in a nation that has had little experience with democracy.

"Citizen political participation in Guinea will -- we hope -- ensure greater stability when a change of political power occurs," said Mamadou Kenda Diallo, a member of the USAID team in Guinea, in an e-mail interview.

For Tostan, this mandate to increase civic involvement will be fulfilled at the grassroots level by teaching people about their human rights and responsibilities -- their right to receive adequate health care, for example, as well as their responsibility to ensure that they receive frequent check-ups during pregnancies.

"It is getting people to see that as human beings, we all have basic rights and we need to look at this when those rights are being violated, and how we can work together to solve those problems," said Melching.

"And people become engaged because it's a noble movement," she continued. "They like it because it's positive. I think people in Africa in particular like being involved in a movement that's positive, rather than one that says we're fighting against something or we're out to destroy or eliminate [something]."

That message is one that Tostan would like to bring to other nations in West Africa.

"We'd like to unite people and allow them to exchange and come together. For major social transformation to come about, there needs to be consensus with large numbers. That's what affects people," said Melching.