At a talk on Thursday night, Molly Melching spoke about her experience working with women in Senegal.
Melching, the founder and director of the Tostan Community Empowerment Program, described the lives of many women in Senegal: After working all day, exhausted from carrying heavy bowls on their heads, and finding firewood to cook meals for their families, some Senegalese end their days with an additional two to three hours of education in a classroom.
At a lecture, which was held at the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Jewish Life at UCLA and hosted by the UCLA Progressive Jewish Student Association, Melching spoke about her experiences with the Tostan Community Empowerment Program, a nongovernmental organization that works to address the needs of these women.
Tostan’s informal education program centers around learning about human rights, democracy, basic education, leadership and problem solving. Lessons are taught by facilitators who represent specific ethnic groups, keeping the women’s education rooted in their native African culture and language.
Melching said that as a result of learning about these issues, women have successfully organized peaceful marches against domestic violence.
Melching, founder and executive director of Tostan, which means “breakthrough” in the Wolof language of Senegal, said she started the program in order to help address the needs of Senegalese women and listen to their input, rather than trying to impose her own views.
“Our vision is to have human dignity for all,” Melching said.
She stressed that 99 percent of the Tostan educational staff leaders are Africans representing 12 different national ethnicities and languages. Teaching methods are based on the African oral traditions of theater, poetry, song and debate to ensure that participants, who are mostly women, feel comfortable in their environments, according to a Tostan brochure.
In allowing the women to lead their own development and education, Melching said a major breakthrough of this 11-year-old organization is its influence in helping communities abandon harmful practices such as female-genital mutilation and child marriage.
Ariel Sholklapper, a third-year philosophy student who attended Melching’s two-hour talk, said he was impressed with Melching’s presentation.
“The tools for social change on a large scale were very succinctly displayed,” he said.
And Michael De Land, a fourth-year sociology student, said hearing Melching speak of her 32 years of firsthand experience in Senegal was inspiring.
“Her approach to empowering the community is amazing, along with her holistic strategy,” De Land said.
Currently, Tostan has implemented its program in more than 2,000 villages in five countries, including new projects in Gambia, Mauritania and Somalia in 2006, Melching said.
Over 400 volunteers working with facilitators in villages help write reports and interact with the women in the program.
“We use social networks for social transformation,” Melching said, emphasizing that Tostan works by facilitating intervillage meetings and ultimately reaches out at a grassroots level.
Ariel Stevenson, co-director of Melching’s presentation and fourth-year international development studies and economics student, said gender-issue topics are rarely talked about.
As a member of the Progressive Jewish Student Association, Stevenson said she believes this was an important issue to present to the community and hopes to bring other such speakers to campus in the future.