2025 Annual Report
Opening Letter (Version 1)
Dear Friends and Partners,
2025 was not an easy year for communities or for the organizations that choose to stand with them. Resources tightened across the development sector. In several contexts where Tostan works, insecurity and fragility placed additional pressure on communities already navigating difficult conditions. More broadly, long-standing assumptions about how development is financed, who defines its priorities, and what counts as lasting progress are being questioned, and rightly so.
What this year confirmed, once again, is that sustainable change does not depend only on favorable conditions. It depends on people’s collective capacity to understand their realities, organize around shared priorities, and act with purpose.
That conviction is at the heart of Tostan’s work. It does not begin with predefined solutions. It begins with education in local languages, through dialogue, reflection, and a shared exploration of rights, responsibilities, and what communities want for their future. That process strengthens individuals. Women, men, and young people build knowledge, confidence, and the capacity to lead. Those individual shifts become collective. Communities organize, define priorities, and take action. Over time, those actions shape the wider territory: more children in school and registered at birth, stronger local governance, reduced conflict, improved access to health services, and more inclusive local economies.
This is the pathway behind the results in this report.
Across Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Mali, communities used this process in 2025 to address challenges that carry real weight in daily life. In Kédougou, young people from Bassari communities defined a response to mental health grounded in their own cultural practices, without waiting for an external expert to name the problem or design the solution. In Mali, community peace committees resolved land disputes and household tensions before they escalated, extending their reach to 130 communities beyond those directly engaged in the program. In Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, women and youth turned learning into economic initiative: managing community loan funds with a 95% repayment rate, financing micro-projects, and strengthening their participation in local markets. I also want to recognize our teams across the region, whose steady presence alongside communities made this work possible in a year marked by real uncertainty and strain.
These results matter beyond the communities where they were produced. The challenges communities addressed in 2025: school inclusion, civil registration, maternal health, conflict prevention, economic resilience, and the protection of girls, are also the challenges that national development agendas across the region have committed to address. Senegal's Vision 2050 places human capital, social equity, territorial development, and good governance at the center of national transformation. The Gambia's Recovery-Focused National Development Plan (RF-NDP) prioritizes education, local governance, civil registration, and women's empowerment. Mali's National Strategy for Emergence and Sustainable Development (SNEDD) links peace, decentralization, citizenship, and human development. Guinea-Bissau's national cooperation framework centers democratic governance, access to social services, and structural economic transformation.
Tostan's contribution is not to substitute for public systems. It is to strengthen the community-level conditions, participation, trust, local organization, and sustained agency that public systems need in order to work.
We close this year with gratitude to the partners and donors who sustained this work, and above all to the communities who continue to lead it. We also close with confidence: in communities that keep moving forward with dignity and determination, and in the young people whose ideas, courage, and commitment are helping shape more just and more resilient futures.
Sobel Aziz Ngom
Chief Executive Officer, Tostan
2025 Results at a Glance
How Change Happens
The process begins with education: in local languages, through dialogue and facilitation, grounded in human rights and shared responsibilities. Education here is an invitation to reflect, to question, and to imagine what change is possible.
That starting point carries more weight than it might appear. When people learn in the language they think and dream in, when they are invited to examine their own realities rather than receive someone else’s diagnosis, something shifts that goes beyond knowledge. Women, men, and young people develop the confidence to speak, the capacity to analyze, and the willingness to lead. They begin to see themselves as actors in their own development.
In the remote and underserved communities where Tostan works, women, men, and young people form or reinforce management committees, define shared priorities, and launch initiatives around challenges they have identified themselves. They determine what gets done, in what order, and with whom. These are precisely the communities that public systems most consistently struggle to reach: households that fall outside administrative data, women and girls excluded from formal decision-making, and youth without access to economic opportunity.
As communities act, the effects extend into local public life. Children out of school get identified and enrolled. Births that went unregistered get recorded, improving the civil registration data that planning ministries depend on. Pregnant women are connected to health services. Land disputes find structured resolution before they escalate. Local elected officials engage more effectively with the communities they represent. Public institutions gain a stronger local foundation for delivering on the commitments governments have made.
This is what makes the results sustainable. When education builds on knowledge communities already hold, and when it strengthens collective capacity rather than individual compliance, change does not depend on the continued presence of an external actor. It spreads through social networks. It survives funding gaps. And it generates forms of local accountability that no external monitoring system can replicate. This is what community-led development looks like.