Senegals' Education (My Opinion, Real Stats)

When you look up at the night sky, you can often see the light of the moon and stars. If I give you a telescope, you can see the detailed craters of the moon, the billions of more stars far beyond, and the colors of our universe. The key to real understanding is knowing what is behind, and how to look for it.

In French class, our yearlong project is to sponsor a Senegalese boy named Alpha. He is an orphan whose only hope to be educated is our classes’ sponsorship. In class, we had meetings and came up with the idea of an international lunch to fundraise the money. We sold tickets and brought in all different kinds of foods, and we ended up raising more money than expected, which we will give to the organization Les Cajoutiers.

This organization allows the ones who can afford it to sponsor a child, even if one is from another country. The actual economical situation of these families doesn’t allow them to pay for their children to go to school and a lot of sensibilisation needs to be done regarding to the advantages of investing in the children studying rather than working at home (for the girls) or on the fields (for the boys).

Then, I began to use a telescope to not only understand more about this issue but, more importantly, try to solve it. This is why the issue of the lack of education in Senegal is so important to me. As I focused the telescope, I quickly found that the lack of education leads to gender and social inequalities in Senegal. Gender inequality means that women are sometimes discriminated, and thought of as lesser than men. Social inequalities leads to the gap between the rich and the poor widening which defocuses the telescope while looking at the society.

First of all, Senegal’s lack of education is due to the fact that there exists higher ratio of boys to girls in Senegalese schools. Girls have always had fewer rights, but as cited in an article by UNICEF, in Senegal they are also forced to do housework, even if they have brothers