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Molly Melching - Senegal
Molly Melching, Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal (1974-76), is the founder and director of Tostan, an NGO that empowers African communities to take charge of their own development through literacy and management skills. Speaking from her office outside of Dakar, Molly discusses the learning and patience required to work for long term social change.
Interview with Molly Melching, Director of Tostan in Dakar, Senegal.
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Molly chose the Wolof word “tostan,” which means “breakthrough" or “spread of knowledge," because Tostan graduates become communicators for social change, as they spread the knowledge they have learned in their Tostan classes.
Over the past two decades, she has learned that it is crucial to understand the local cultures to initiate social change. In this interview, she describes her approach to the death of young girls in child marriages and how she is trying to stop the practice of female mutilation.
She explains how she trained a Tostan graduate to collect statistics in his travels from village to village to keep track of the numbers of young girls dying in childbirth. He detailed these numbers in meetings in each village, often sitting outside on the ground with villagers arrayed around him. He showed them that they were literally killing their daughters. The result was a change in the culture of the 28 villages he contacted.
Molly found this pattern –people learning skills at Tostan and then taking them to other villages, putting them to work and passing them on- to be the most effective way to initiate social change.
CLICK on the player above to listen to her interview. Feel free to leave a comment or a question below if you wish.
