8 - Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
Summary
You might be asking yourself: what changes followed the Tostan programme in Galle Toubaaco in the longer term? Long-term changes have been reported elsewhere (Cislaghi et al. 2016; Diop et al. 2008); I did not remain long enough in Galle Toubaaco to observe the longerterm changes that might have followed the Tostan programme there. I did visit Galle Toubaaco at a later point, though. It was January 2016, almost six years after the beginning of the HRE classes. We had been driving across the dunes for a few hours and, having got lost a couple of times, we had decided to ask for directions from a man, who jumped in the car and took us to the village. By the time we made it there, night had fallen. As I got out of the car, I thought we had arrived in the wrong place; right in front of me was a big concrete building that I had never seen before. I was getting back in the car when my adoptive son, Alpha, came running to greet us, with his entire family after him. It was a night of tea, chatting and laughing. They told me that, when the CEP finished, they wanted to have more education, so they lobbied the government to have a school. Many children were studying there; Alpha could now speak a good deal of French, and I could see in the eyes of his mother and father how proud they were.
I do not have evidence that would help understand the extent to which the Tostan programme had contributed to that change – nor I can engage in the complex task of debating whether it is right to ask traditionally nomadic populations to settle in the same place for their children to go to school or not. However, if the data and anecdotes collected by Tostan's internal evaluation team are representative (e.g. Cisse et al. 2016), it is likely that the CEP somehow did contribute to that change.
SOCIAL CHANGE IN GALLE TOUBAACO: GENDER RELATIONS, POWER BALANCE AND HARMFUL PRACTICES
This book has revealed how a human rights education programme engaged participants so that they became aware of the way in which they made sense of the world.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Human Rights and Community-led DevelopmentLessons from Tostan, pp. 237 - 255Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017