Our Impact
Community-led change, with measurable results across West Africa
people reached
children enrolled
loan repayment
to ending harmful practices
Early Childhood, School Access & Civil Registration
In many remote communities, children's opportunities are shaped long before they enter a classroom. Closing that gap requires working at the household level and the system level at the same time.
caregivers reached through parenting education in Guinea-Bissau, The Gambia, and Mali
children supported with school kits, including 767 girls, in Guinea-Bissau
of children identified as out of school in partner communities were enrolled through community-led initiatives
of children identified as unregistered at birth were registered
In many remote communities, children’s opportunities are shaped long before they enter a classroom. Family practices, early brain stimulation, and the relationship between households and local education systems all determine whether children arrive at school ready to learn, and whether they arrive at all. Where these conditions are weak, exclusion begins before formal schooling does. Closing that gap requires working at the household level and the system level at the same time, which is precisely where public education systems, stretched thin across large and sparsely populated areas, most consistently fall short. Governments across West Africa have recognized this priority. The Gambia’s Recovery-Focused National Development Plan, Mali’s National Strategy for Emergence and Sustainable Development, and Guinea-Bissau’s national cooperation framework each place human capital, equitable access to education, and stronger civil registration among their core development commitments. Delivering on those commitments in remote and underserved communities remains the hardest part.
Tostan’s contribution begins with education and dialogue. Across 76 communities in Guinea-Bissau, The Gambia, and Mali, 4,176 parents and caregivers participated in learning sessions on early brain stimulation, child development, communication, and social norms, conducted in local languages through reflection and facilitated dialogue. Monitoring documented changes in daily caregiving practices, including fathers and mothers speaking more often with their children during routine activities such as feeding and bathing, reading to their children at home, and reviving the practice of storytelling together. These shifts reflect something deeper than behavior change. They reflect a recalibration of what families understand to be their role in children’s learning, before and during school age.
Participating communities identified children who were out of school, followed up with families, and mobilized around enrollment and birth registration. In partner communities, 62% of children identified as out of school were enrolled, and 63% of children identified as unregistered at birth were registered. Both figures matter beyond the household. Birth registration is a legal threshold: without it, children cannot access health services, sit national examinations, or be counted in the planning data governments use to allocate education budgets. When communities close it, they contribute directly to the accuracy of the population data that national planning ministries use to allocate education and health budgets.
In Guinea-Bissau, Tostan worked alongside the Ministry of Education to support community teachers, many of whom had received no prior formal teacher training. That collaboration strengthened classroom practices and improved coordination between schools and families. It also points to something with broader policy relevance: community-based educators, properly supported, can extend the reach of public education systems into areas where the state is structurally underrepresented.
Conflict Prevention
In Mali, the retreat of state authority has left many rural communities managing tensions over land, household relations, and shared resources with little institutional support. The question is whether the conditions for local peace can be built and sustained.
participants engaged in peace and security learning sessions across 30 communities in Mali
additional communities reached through community-led dialogue and mediation mechanisms
In Mali, the retreat of state authority across large parts of the country has left many rural communities managing tensions over land, household relations, and shared resources with little institutional support. When those tensions go unaddressed, they escalate. The question is not whether local conflict prevention matters. It is whether the conditions for it can be built and sustained. Mali’s SNEDD places peace and security, decentralization, citizenship, resilient territories, and the restoration of state legitimacy at the center of national development strategy.
Tostan’s learning sessions on dialogue, governance, and collective responsibility gave that local capacity a structured foundation. In 2025, 3,356 people across 30 communities in Mali engaged in these sessions. Women played a central role, building legitimacy as actors in processes from which they are routinely excluded.
Communities turned those capacities into structured action. Community Peace Committees addressed land disputes, household tensions, and relations between neighboring villages. Through mediation, peer outreach, and intercommunity exchange, these committees extended their reach to 130 additional communities, none of which had participated directly in the program. Public declarations, signed by administrative, traditional, and religious authorities, formalized the link between community decisions and local governance structures.
That formalization matters for sustainability. When community-led peace work is recognized by local authorities, it gains legitimacy that outlasts any single program cycle.
Economic Inclusion
In many rural communities, the barrier to economic activity is not ambition or capacity. It is the absence of financial mechanisms that communities can actually use — accessible, appropriately sized, and governed by people who understand the local economy.
people accessed financial support through community-managed loans across 100 communities in Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau
in seed capital provided through Tostan's programme placed under community management
in additional grants provided through the ECOWAS Fund for Regional Stabilization and Development in Guinea-Bissau
Average times capital circulated within the same communities
repayment rate
In many rural communities across West Africa, the barrier to economic activity is not ambition or capacity. It is the absence of financial mechanisms that communities can actually use: accessible, appropriately sized, and governed by people who understand the local economy. Formal banking infrastructure does not reach most of the rural areas where Tostan works. Where it does reach, its terms rarely fit the income cycles and risk profiles of smallholder farmers, market traders, or young people starting out. Senegal’s Vision 2050, and Guinea-Bissau’s national cooperation framework each place productive inclusion, women and youth participation, and territorial economic resilience at the center of public development ambition. The implementation gap is consistent: formal financial systems do not reach the communities these frameworks are designed to serve.
The gap is not primarily one of ambition or productive potential but one of governance capacity. Communities cannot manage individual or collective finance reliably without literacy, numeracy, and accountability skills. For adults who have not completed formal schooling, those skills need to be built deliberately. Education in local languages, through dialogue and collective practice, did exactly that. Across 100 communities in Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau, community management committees acquired the skills to manage collective funds, issue microloans, and track repayments. Approximately $112,000 in seed capital placed under community management enabled 2,580 individuals to access small loans for agricultural processing, small trade, and food production.
In Senegal, the Meew liggey tekki Jiggeen-West african scaling Up (MELITEJI-WASU)project deepened that process across 25 communities connected to the dairy value chain, where women and youth built literacy, numeracy, project management, and collective decision-making skills that translated directly into stronger participation in local markets. The funds across the three countries maintained a 95 percent repayment rate, reflecting the accountability that comes from lending within a community where relationships and accountability carry weight that no formal credit scoring system can replicate.
Capital did not stop at the first round of borrowers. It circulated an average of six times within the same communities, extending access to financing without requiring additional external resources. One dollar invested in a community-managed fund produced six rounds of economic activity before leaving the system. That is the financing efficiency case for community-governed capital, and it is visible in the repayment and circulation data from all three countries. At the household level, access translated into more than income generation. Participants drew on savings and loan mechanisms to cover health consultations and school fees, reducing dependence on high-cost informal borrowing and protecting productive assets during periods of financial pressure. At that scale, financial inclusion becomes a household resilience mechanism with direct consequences for health and education outcomes.
In Guinea-Bissau, in addition to the community-managed loan fund, grants totaling $59,000 were provided through the ECOWAS Fund for Regional Stabilization and Development, with Tostan as the implementing partner. These grants supported economic initiatives across 36 communities in Bafatá and Gabú. A total of 406 individuals, including 303 women and girls, financed micro-projects that contributed to household income and local economic stability. More than 2,000 people also received training in agroecology and agricultural product processing, strengthening the productive base on which those micro-projects depend. These results were produced in fragile regions that ECOWAS has designated as stabilization priorities. They suggest that where communities have built literacy, numeracy, and collective accountability, financial inclusion produces durable results. Capital circulates, repayment holds, and households build resilience.
Gender-Based Violence Prevention
Practices like female genital cutting and child marriage are not maintained by indifference to harm. They are held in place by shared expectations — enforced through what families believe others will accept, what communities believe tradition requires.
communities in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau publicly committed to ending child marriage, female genital cutting, and gender-based violence
people engaged in community-led mobilization in Guinea-Bissau
Practices like female genital cutting and child marriage are not maintained by indifference to harm. They are held in place by shared expectations, enforced quietly through what families believe others will accept, what communities believe tradition requires, and what individuals believe they have the standing to question. Changing them requires the conditions in which communities can examine those expectations together and arrive at a different shared understanding.
Those conditions are built deliberately. Communities begin by exploring human rights principles in their own languages, examining what those principles mean in daily life and what they demand of the people who hold them. That knowledge becomes the basis for dialogue. Women, men, and youth reflect together on how their practices align with the values and vision of wellbeing they have defined for themselves and their children. Practices that cause harm do not survive that examination intact. The commitment to change that follows is collective, grounded in shared values, and reinforced through the same relationships that once sustained the practices being abandoned.
In 2025, that process led 75 communities in Senegal to declare the abandonment of child marriage, female genital cutting, and gender-based violence in the presence of administrative, traditional, and religious authorities. Those declarations committed communities to a monitoring structure with defined roles: identifying risks, raising alerts, and engaging families before situations escalate.
In Guinea-Bissau, community-led campaigns reached 7,226 people across Bafatá and Gabú. Religious and community leaders trained on gender-based violence and child protection led that work, engaging directly with families and bringing 20 communities to formalize commitments grounded in human rights and their own vision of community wellbeing.
Beyond prevention, targeted action reached women living with obstetric fistula in Guinea-Bissau and The Gambia. In partnership with UNFPA and the Ministry of Health, women who sought care received surgical repair, medical support, financial assistance for income-generating activities, and structured accompaniment back into community life. Fistula isolates. The work of reintegration, economic, social, and relational, is what restores a woman’s place in her community, and it is the part of fistula response that most programs do not reach.
The commitments to abandon harmful practices documented across 95 communities in two countries reflect an obligation that African states have formally accepted. The Maputo Protocol requires signatory states to prohibit and eliminate harmful practices affecting women and girls, including female genital mutilation and child marriage, and to take active measures to ensure protection. Community declarations backed by monitoring mechanisms and trained local leaders are one of the few documented pathways through which that obligation successfully moves from policy text into daily practice.
Youth Mental Health
In Kédougou, young people from Bassari communities identified mental health as a collective priority before any program had named it as one — and proposed a response rooted in their own cultural practices.
young people supported
community-designed initiative
Oct. 2025
launch date
In Kédougou, young people from Bassari communities identified mental health as a collective priority before any program had named it as one. Through their engagement in Tostan’s education sessions, they proposed a response rooted in their own cultural practices, without waiting for an external framework to define either the problem or the solution.
Tostan’s role was to create the conditions for that process: the space, the facilitation, and the structured dialogue through which youth could speak openly, reflect together, and shape a response they recognized as their own. That process led to The Art of Wellbeing, launched in octobre 2025 in collaboration with the Being Initiative and with support from Grand Challenges Canada. The initiative supports 200 young people through dance, music, and visual arts, combined with facilitation that deepens understanding, reduces stigma, and sustains dialogue on mental health within the community.
What shifted first was not a behavior or an indicator. It was the capacity of young people to name a challenge that had previously gone unspoken and claim collective ownership of a response. From that starting point, a broader community pathway to wellbeing began to take shape.
The policy relevance is direct. Mental health remains one of the least resourced priorities in West African public health systems, despite its documented effects on productivity, social cohesion, and youth participation.
Senegal’s Vision 2050 links human capital, youth engagement, and territorial cohesion as interdependent development goals. Work that addresses mental health through culturally grounded, youth-led processes contributes to all three simultaneously, and does so in communities that national health infrastructure has not consistently reached.
Reintegration of Women in Detention
In Senegal, leaving detention does not end the conditions that made reintegration difficult in the first place. Stigma limits employment opportunities. Family ties, often strained during incarceration, do not repair themselves.
direct and indirect program participants engaged in education and practical training sessions
Training covered income-generating activities aligned with local market demand, including food processing, tailoring, and small-scale production
In Senegal, leaving detention does not end the conditions that made reintegration difficult in the first place. Stigma limits employment opportunities. Family ties, often strained or broken during incarceration, do not repair themselves. Without income and without restored relationships, women released from detention face a narrow path back into community life, and the absence of structured support makes that path narrower still.
In 2025, 339 women in detention participated directly in education sessions and practical training in food processing, tailoring, and small-scale production, skills selected for their alignment with local market demand and realistic income potential upon release. Beyond the direct participants, 1,368 additional people were reached through the program: family members engaged in mediation and follow-up visits, prison guards trained to support the reintegration process, and former detainees who benefited from program activities. Together they represent the broader circle of support that determines whether reintegration holds after release from prison.
Reintegration efforts addressed family relationships directly. Mediation sessions and structured follow-up visits helped re-establish communication between detainees and their families, rebuilding the social ties that income alone cannot restore. Upon release, selected participants received start-up capital to begin income-generating activities, reducing immediate financial pressure and dependence on informal or unstable sources of support.
The combination of practical skills, restored family relationships, and access to start-up capital reflects a documented pattern in reintegration programming: economic stability and social belonging reinforce each other. Monitoring data from this program shows that women who accessed both were better positioned to stabilize their situation after release, though a consolidated outcome study across the full participant group would strengthen that finding considerably.
Reintegration sits at the intersection of justice, social protection, livelihoods, and social cohesion. Senegal’s Vision 2050 places social equity and human capital at the center of national transformation. Work that addresses all four dimensions simultaneously, and that rebuilds the community inclusion on which sustainable reintegration depends, contributes directly to that ambition in ways that correctional systems acting alone rarely achieve.