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This report explores children and young people’s views and experiences related to COVID-19 and its indirect impacts. Firstly, it looks at children and young people’s perceptions of how COVID-19 has had an impact on their lives and countries. Secondly, it seeks to highlight the ways in which they are working to help to stop the spread of the virus and lessen its impacts.
This research included individual and group interviews with 160 children and young people (80 girls and 80 boys) between the ages of of nine and 18 from eight countries across West Africa: Central…
Abstract
Globalization of knowledge and scholarship raises the challenges of dialogue between Global North and South. Northern knowledge and voice remain privileged, while writing from the South often goes unread. This is true also in emerging adulthood and care-leaving scholarship. The special issue of Emerging Adulthood titled “Care-Leaving in Africa” is the first collection of essays on care-leaving by African scholars. It presents both care-leaving and emerging adulthood scholars from the Global North a unique opportunity to consider the implications of a rising…
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…
This report is based on 11 weeks of field research in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau between November 2009 and February 2010. During the course of this research, interviews were conducted with 175 children; 33 religious authorities, marabouts, and imams in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau; Senegalese and Bissau-Guinean government officials at the national and local levels; diplomats; academics and religious historians; representatives from international organizations, including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM);…
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.