Displaying 1 - 4 of 4
This country care review includes the care-related Concluding Observations adopted by the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Committees' recommendations on the issues relevant to children's care are highlighted, as well as other care-related concluding observations, ratification dates, and links to the Universal Periodic Review and Hague Intercountry Adoption Country Profile.
In March 2013, a fire erupted in the Dakar neighborhood of Medina and a Quranic boarding school, housed in a makeshift shack caught on fire. Eight young boys at the school were burned to death, but the guardian was absent because the house was unsanitary and uninhabitable. After the incident, President Macky Sall promised to end forced child begging and the inhuman living conditions in certain Quranic schools. While there has been some progress, Sall’s promise remains largely unrealized. This report examines the uneven government efforts in the year since…
At least 50,000 children attending hundreds of residential Quranic schools, or daaras, in Senegal are subjected to conditions akin to slavery and forced to endure often extreme forms of abuse, neglect, and exploitation by the teachers, or marabouts, who serve as their de facto guardians. By no means do all Quranic schools run such regimes, but many marabouts force the children, known as talibés, to beg on the streets for long hours—a practice that meets the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) definition of a worst form of child labor—and subject them to often brutal physical and…
Tens of thousands of children in Senegal are being forced to beg for food by abusive teachers in Qur'anic schools just one year after government crackdown on the issue.