Molly Melching « Skoll Foundation

Tostan

Skoll Entrepreneur(s): Molly Melching
Focus Area(s) Addressed: Education and Economic Opportunity
Award Year: 2010

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Molly Melching has lived and worked in Senegal, West Africa since 1974 and has dedicated her life to the empowerment of communities at grassroots levels. Molly’s early experience working with children in Dakar and living in a rural village enforced her beliefs that many development efforts were not addressing the true needs and realities of African communities. In collaboration with the villagers, Molly began to develop a new type of learning program that actively involved both adults and adolescents by using African languages and traditional methods of learning. Their efforts grew throughout the 1980s, leading Molly to found Tostan in 1991.

Tostan is an organization whose innovative grassroots education model—the Community Empowerment Program (CEP)—engages communities for three years in the cross-cutting themes of democracy, human rights, problem-solving, hygiene, health, literacy, project management skills, and parental education.

Molly is highly regarded for her expertise in nonformal education, human rights training, and social transformation. Her work with Tostan has brought her international recognition for results in many areas of development which include, reductions in infant and maternal mortality, widespread school and birth registration, the emergence of female leadership and the abandonment of female genital cutting (FGC) and child/forced marriage.

IMPACT AS OF JAN. 2013:

Over 200,000 community members have directly participated in Tostan’s program, and over two million have been reached indirectly through its ‘organized diffusion’ model.
Over 2,000 Community Management Committees (CMC) and dozens of regional federations have been formed, with over 80 per cent managed by women.
Over 6,000 communities in seven African countries (Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal, Somalia and The Gambia) have publicly declared their decision to abandon female genital cutting (FGC) and child/forced marriage.
Tostan’s approach to FGC abandonment has been integrated into national and international strategies, including 10 U.N. agencies and 5 governments. In Senegal, the government has adopted a National Action Plan that calls for using the human rights approach pioneered by Tostan to end FGC.
A moving book, “However Long the Night,” about Molly’s work will be published April 2013.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THEIR WORK:

Tonight, we honor nine individuals, representing seven organizations doing work in environmental sustainability,
economic opportunity, community development, and conflict resolution. They work throughout the world in the US, Africa, Indonesia, Latin America, Afghanistan, and beyond.

Jeff, would you come join me? Tostan, Molly Melching.

Our last award recipient tonight is Molly Melching. Few activities in the development arena, deliver more value and are more leverage than that of investing in female rights and education.

Molly has lived in Senegal for more than thirty years building and expanding Tostan's model for community-led development and large scale social transformation. Tostan bases it's have working in human rights, coupled with respect for community culture literature and knowledge systems.

It delivers its educational program to each communities citizens over a 30-month time horizon, long enough to ensure that changes to local norms are driven by stakeholders, and that those changes will hold.

Abandonment of female genital cutting has been a cornerstone of the program and proof of its effectiveness.

Thanks to the work of Tostan, over 4,200 communities, comprising some four million people, have publicly declared abandonment of female genital cutting in Senegal, Guinea, Burkini Faso, the Gambia, and Somalia.

In addition 4,000 Tostan communities have also stopped the practice of child marriage.

Molly Melching.

Thank you so much. It is such an honor and pleasure to be here with you tonight .

On February 14th, 1998, representatives of 13 communities gathered in central Senegal in the small village of Diabugu, to announce the outcome of many months of community-wide deliberation.

They declared as a collective extended family the end of female genital cutting, a century's old tradition which they have previously embraced and observed with almost religious fervor.

At the time of this declaration many working on this issue had predicted that female genital cutting, which began in Africa and has endured for almost 2000 or more years would certainly take a hundred, two hundred, maybe never ... is what some people said, to end, despite the clear evidence of the harm that it caused.

And this, because previous attempts to fight, to pass laws against FGC, had always met with fierce opposition and resistance at the grassroots level.

Twelve years after Deabugul made their declaration, as Sally just said, over 4,200 villages, and just in Senegal, 4,229 to be exact,
have joined those first thirteen villages in an historic movement to abandon a practice that has caused great suffering and pain to millions of girls and women.

And it is the villagers themselves who once practiced FGC. The elders, the women, the men and all the youth also. That after participating in the Tostan community empowerment program are at the forefront, and leading the way.

These communities have done what was once thought was impossible.

They have changed an entrenched harmful social norm through a vibrant and positive grassroots movement.

I think it is very important, as Paul said. It wasn't about blame and shame or humiliating anybody or fighting against what people were doing.

It was about going forward with human rights and for health. People feeling they were part of a noble and positive movement that inspired them that made them want to be part of this exciting movement that was going on.

But as Tostan now seeks funding to spread the movement and the many other program outcomes across Africa.

We are confronted with social norms in the development world which are extremely confusing and frustrating, as Scott said, for often it is the donor-driven, top-down, outside-in, and highly expensive development model that seems to be the accepted norm.

It is for this very reason that we are so extremely grateful for the school foundation award.

An award that will allow Tostan to continue our work in providing grassroots communities with these social and economic resources they need to guide and lead their own development, and do it in the way we know is right, from within.

As the people of Senegal wisely say, the chameleon can change it's color to match the earth. But, the earth does not change color to match the chameleon.

My dream tonight is that the mounting evidence of success from bottom up approaches such as Tostan and the other schools awardes that are all here tonight present in this room.

Will create a critical mass, a movement to shift the current paradigm towards the development model that has been discussed with so much passion.

Here at the school forum these past days. One of a partnership, a partnership led by the communities themselves.

In closing, and I am the last one tonight. I was thinking how can I thank you for this wonderful award.

And I thought what if the women of Senegal were here, I know exactly what they would do. they would dance.

So, I am going to dance. Thank you very much.

Now I read my

Skoll Foundation

Tostan

CONTACT INFO

LOCATION

Tostan on PBS NewsHour

Mother’s Day Inspiration from Skoll Awardees

Molly Melching's U.S. Book Tour Dates

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