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 as the starting point
Change begins with education.In Tostan’s approach, education happens in local languages, through dialogue, facilitation, and reflection. It is grounded in human rights and shared responsibilities. It does not begin by telling communities what is wrong. It begins by creating space for people to question, analyze, and imagine what change is possible.
From knowledge to confidence
This starting point matters.When people learn in the language they think, speak, and dream in, they do more than acquire information. They begin to see their own experience differently. Women, men, and young people gain the confidence to speak, the tools to analyze their realities, and the willingness to lead change themselves.They begin to see themselves not as beneficiaries, but as actors in their own development.
Communities define their own priorities
In the remote and underserved communities where Tostan works, women, men, and young people form or strengthen community management committees. Together, they identify shared priorities and launch initiatives around the challenges they have named themselves.They decide what needs to be done, in what order, and with whom.These are often the very communities that public systems struggle most to reach: households missing from administrative data, women and girls excluded from formal decision-making, and young people with limited access to economic opportunity.
Local action strengthens public systems
As communities act, the effects extend into local public life.Children who are out of school are identified and enrolled. Births that were never registered are recorded, improving the civil registration data that planning ministries rely on. Pregnant women are connected to health services. Land disputes are addressed through structured dialogue before they escalate. Local elected officials engage more effectively with the communities they represent.Over time, public institutions gain a stronger local foundation for delivering on the commitments governments have made.
Why the results last
This is what makes the results sustainable.When education builds on the 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. It creates forms of local accountability that no external monitoring system can replicate.
This is community-led development
Community-led development is not simply about participation. It is about people building the confidence, structures, and relationships they need to shape their own future. That is how change happens.
What Defined 2025
Adapting for the unreached
Tostan Kept Evolving
In 2025, Tostan continued to refine how it supports community-led change. This included adapting the Community Empowerment Program curricula for SolarSPELL, a solar-powered offline digital library designed for low-connectivity settings and accessible via mobile phone. The adaptation also advanced broader program revision to integrate new knowledge around relational wellbeing and mental health. The goal is a model that stays rooted in local-language learning, dialogue, reflection, and community ownership, while remaining relevant and accessible to the realities rural communities face today. For governments and partners working in areas with limited infrastructure, that combination matters: it means the approach can reach the communities that most development programming leaves behind.
Adapting for the unreached
The Model Kept Spreading
In 2025, Tostan's methodology continued to expand through training, mutual learning, and institutional partnerships. In northern Benin, 22 local organizations working in fragile, high-risk areas adapted Tostan’s approach, combining social cohesion work with attention to the mental health needs of women, youth, and communities bearing the heaviest cost of instability. In Ethiopia's Omo Valley, participants from five indigenous communities engaged with Tostan’s model, leaving with concrete action plans and newly established community management committees. In Accra, 30 civil society actors from West and East Africa sought out Tostan's methodology as a practical framework for social norms change and community-led transformation. Seminars also took place in Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, and The Gambia. What these experiences reflect is a distinction that matters for how institutional partners think about scale. Organizations are not seeking to reproduce Tostan's program as designed. They are drawing on its methodology to address their own contexts, adapting tools, sequencing, and content to specific social realities. Since 2015, 1,025 practitioners from 50 countries have learned about Tostan’s approach and methodology in our sharing and mutual learning seminars. The more demanding question is what happens when those practitioners carry the approach forward without Tostan's direct presence. A Global Fund for Children learning review provides significant evidence on that point. Among organizations that applied Tostan’s methodology independently in Liberia and Sierra Leone, reviewers documented stronger leadership by women and youth, reduced conflict and gender-based violence, improved school attendance, and communities reexamining harmful practices through dialogue grounded in their own values.
“What I experienced through Tostan’s training was a shift in how we approach development work. This training changed how we design programs. Instead of applying predefined approaches, we now work with communities to define priorities and build ownership from the outset. This makes our interventions more relevant and sustainable.”
Songaye George Buannie, Male Engagement and GBV Specialist, Sierra Leone, 2025
“Although we often enter communities with good intentions, our approach sometimes leaves critical gaps. This training emphasized allowing communities to define their own vision and identify the resources they already possess. Meaningful development happens with communities, not for them. At Caritas Ghana, we plan to cascade this approach to our local substructures so that those working directly with communities can integrate it into their daily work.”
Richard Nyihaba Akrugu, Caritas Ghana, Ghana, 2025
Our Impact
Early Childhood, School Access & Civil Registration
Children enrolled
62
Birth certificates issued
63
Prenatal consultation rate
91
Across 76 communities in Guinea-Bissau, The Gambia, and Mali, parents and caregivers participated in learning sessions on early brain stimulation, child development, and social norms — conducted in local languages through dialogue. Monitoring documented changes in daily caregiving: fathers and mothers speaking more with their children, reading at home, reviving the practice of storytelling.
Communities that can see who is being left out — and act through existing institutions to close that gap — are contributing to the accuracy of data that national planning ministries use to allocate budgets.
Conflict Prevention in Mali
Community reach multiplier
x5.3
Women leading mediation
↑ significant
In Mali, the retreat of state authority left communities managing tensions over land and shared resources with little institutional support. 3,356 people across 30 communities engaged in learning sessions on dialogue and collective responsibility. Women emerged as leaders of conflict mediation processes from which they are routinely excluded.
Community Peace Committees addressed land disputes and intercommunal friction through deliberation, before they could harden into something more difficult to address. Through peer outreach, their reach extended to 130 additional communities — none of which participated directly in the program.
When disputes are resolved through deliberation, social trust deepens and communities grow more capable of managing the next conflict that arises.
Economic Inclusion across 3 Countries
Repayment rate
95
Women & youth participants
majority
Community reach multiplier
$112K
Across 100 communities in Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau, 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. Capital circulated an average of six times within the same communities.
In Guinea-Bissau, grants totaling $59,000 through the ECOWAS Fund supported 406 individuals including 303 women and girls, financing micro-projects and contributing to household income and local economic stability.
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.
GBV Prevention & Protection
Communities with formal commitment
95
Senegal: child marriage declarations
75 communities
In 2025, 75 communities in Senegal declared the abandonment of child marriage, female genital cutting, and gender-based violence in the presence of administrative, traditional, and religious authorities — with monitoring structures and defined roles for identifying risks and engaging families before situations escalate.
In Guinea-Bissau, community-led campaigns reached 7,226 people. Women living with obstetric fistula received surgery, income support, and accompaniment back into community life through a partnership with UNFPA — all resumed economic activity.
Communities that can see who is being left out — and act through existing institutions to close that gap — are contributing to the accuracy of data that national planning ministries use to allocate budgets.
Oct. 2025
launch date
Youth Mental Health in Kédougou
Children enrolled
62
Birth certificates issued
63
Prenatal consultation rate
91
In Kédougou, young people from Bassari communities identified mental health as a collective priority — before any program had named it as one. Through 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.
The Art of Wellbeing, launched in Outubro 2025 in collaboration with the Being Initiative and with support from Grand Challenges Canada, supports 200 young people through dance, music, and visual arts, combined with facilitation that deepens understanding, reduces stigma, and sustains dialogue on mental health.
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.
Reintegration of Women in Detention
Women in direct training (tailoring, food, production)
339
Family mediation sessions conducted
ongoing
In Senegal, leaving detention does not end the conditions that made reintegration difficult. Stigma limits employment. Family ties, often strained during incarceration, do not repair themselves. In 2025, 339 women participated in education sessions and practical training in food processing, tailoring, and small-scale production.
Beyond direct participants, 1,368 additional people were reached: family members in mediation, prison guards trained for reintegration support, and former detainees. Upon release, selected participants received start-up capital to begin income-generating activities.
Communities that can see who is being left out — and act through existing institutions to close that gap — are contributing to the accuracy of data that national planning ministries use to allocate budgets.
In the News
In 2025, Tostan’s work and the communities it partners with were featured by 86 national and international media outlets in French, English, and local languages. Coverage highlighted girls’ education, women’s health, the abandonment of harmful practices, and social cohesion, reflecting growing recognition that community-led transformation matters not only in development practice, but in wider public debate.