USA/SENEGAL: Grass roots African aid group campaigning to abolish female circumcision awarded the world's largest humanitarian prize at New York ceremony

The Senegal-based aid group Tostan, which means 'breakthrough' in the local Wolof language, has won the 1.5 million U.S. dollars Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Award, considered the most prestigious humanitarian prize. The group, which has just 370 almost exclusively African staff, uses traditional song, poetry, theatre and dance to educate some of the poorest villagers in Senegal and neighbouring countries about development and human rights. Founded in 1991 by Molly Melching, an American who has lived in Senegal for 32 years, one of Tostan's achievements has been to encourage thousands of women to speak out against female genital mutilation, long a taboo subject in West Africa. At the award ceremony held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Steven Hilton, acknowledged that the jury had been courageous in giving Tostan the well deserved award because its work with female circumcision could be seen as an awkward topic by some. "We will continue with those activities for which we won the prize. We will continue to spread our education program not only throughout Senegal which we hope might be one of the countries to abandon this practice in Africa, but also to go across borders because this is a practice that is not a question of countries," said Melching. Melching, who accepted the award on behalf of her organization, stood on the stage with an exuberant sixty year old Oureye Sall, a former Senegalese female genital cutter who gave up the practice ten years ago and now works with Tostan, to spread awareness about why female circumcision is unhealthy and dangerous for little girls. She has been travelling to different villages to spread the message and said that there is a great deal of resistance still from villagers, but things were also changing slowly. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon also attended the ceremony. He praised Tostan's grassroots approach and its encouragement of the participation of women. Tostan's grass roots approach, using indigenous African languages and working in the poorest communities, has drawn comparisons with the campaign to wipe out foot binding in China, once a similarly deeply-rooted cultural phenomenon. When the women of Malicounda Bambara, a village south of Senegal's capital Dakar where Tostan is active, publicly abandoned female genital cutting 10 years ago, they were the first community in the region to do so. Today, nearly half of Senegalese villages have made similar declarations, along with 298 in Guinea and 23 in Burkina Faso, a fact celebrated in Malicounda Bambara last month when villagers from across the region came to mark the 10th anniversary. Tostan was one of nearly 250 nominees for the Hilton Prize, awarded each year since 1996 by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation established by the late hotel entrepreneur.

ITN Source | September 14, 2007

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