'People treat you as if you are nothing'

from The Guardian

What good is free education when poverty means children are forced into work? Liz Ford reports from Senegal.

It's a hot, sunny day on Goree Island, a short boat ride from Senegal's bustling capital, Dakar. In the cooling shade of an overhanging tree in the grounds of Mariama Ba school, Aminata Deme talks about a short film on slavery she and her classmates have just recorded. In it, the 14-year-old plays a girl who abuses her family's maid.

"I was one of the people mistreating the maid, which was bad. It was a very meaningful film and very interesting to make," says Aminata.

It's not uncommon in the more wealthy homes in Senegal's cities to have someone to help around the house. But the age of those performing the chores, the hours they work and the wages they receive have been called into question by the 19 pupils from Mariama Ba who shot the film, called My Maid, Not a Slave, as part of an anti-slavery project organised by the UK branch of the children's rights charity Plan International.

The new slavery

Over the past few months, the pupils at the girls' school, one of the most prestigious in Senegal, have been learning about the history of slavery, the impact the trade has had on west Africa and how new forms of the practice have been allowed to seep into society.

Organised by Plan UK and National Museums Liverpool to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade this year, the project, Make the Link, Break the Chain, involved schoolchildren from 13 schools based along the so-called slave triangle.

Pupils from Senegal, Sierra Leone, Brazil, Haiti and the UK created web pages, produced written work and shared information online and by email. The youngsters then used video, music and art to interpret their findings. All their work will be showcased at the International Slavery Museum, which opens in Liverpool this week.

Goree is a fitting location for a project on slavery. Between 1776 and 1848, hundreds of thousands of slaves were shipped to the Americas from a transit house on the edge of the island. Walking around the house now, its bright red walls seem too cheerful for the horror of what went on here. Visitors are shown the shackles the slaves wore and the cramped rooms in which they lived.

It is a brutal reminder of the past, but as the work of Mariama Ba's pupils shows, a new form of slavery still exists in Senegal. In a dusty village about 70km north of Dakar, 17-year-old Salimata Kandge talks about the two years she spent working as a maid in the capital. From the age of 13, she cooked and cleaned for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for CFA 15,000 a month - about $30 - barely a dollar a day. She was verbally abused by her employers, ignored by people she met in the street and longed to go home.

"The bosses tell you that you are here for work and you have to work, and when you go out, there are other people who treat you like you are nothing," she says.

No alternative

Absa Nguing, now 20, says when she was younger, she went to Dakar with her sisters and her mother, who needed to find work to feed the family. She never went to school and, at the age of 12, she too became a domestic maid. "It was difficult when I became a maid, but I was obliged to do it," she says. "I worked with a woman who was blind. I went to the market one day and when I came back, the woman took the fish I bought and hit me with it. She was not happy with what I'd bought, but I didn't know because I was very young."

Two years ago, Salimata and Absa were brought back from Dakar to their home villages, thanks to an initiative supported by Plan International. The organisation has been involved in setting up training centres in needlework, hairdressing and metal work in villages around Thiès, Senegal's second largest city, to offer the youngsters vocational qualifications. Salimata and Absa are now working towards diplomas in hairdressing and sewing, respectively. Plan is also providing financial incentives to parents to keep their children at home and in school.

A combination of poverty and an education system that has little concern for those who struggle leads many young people to Dakar to search for work. According to Unicef, 37% of children between the ages of five and 14 are involved in some form of work in Senegal. Although primary and secondary education is compulsory - and free - many parents are still reluctant to send their children to school, and drop-out rates are high.

Children who finish their primary education have to sit an exam to determine if, and where, they will get a place in secondary school. Those who do well go to good schools, such as Mariama Ba, a state-funded institution that used to educate the daughters of the elite but now takes the brightest girls from across the country. Those who perform poorly find their choices limited and often end up in classes of more than 80 children. Those who fail tend to disappear from the education radar altogether.

If children make it through the first two years of secondary school, they sit a further exam to determine whether they will finish their education. But some, mostly girls, do not get the chance to sit this exam. They are married off or are considered old enough to be sent out to earn money for the family, which in many cases for rural teenagers involves a perilous trip to the capital.

Salimata began working in Dakar after she finished primary school. She had failed her secondary exams, but even if she had passed, she might not have been allowed to stay on, as her family needed money.

"It's about poverty. Families need their children to go to work," says Falelou Seck, programme unit manager at Plan in Thiès.Seck is charged with helping to bring children back from Dakar and prevent more going there. His work is concentrated in two regions around Thiès that are home to more than 5,000 families. He estimates that at least one child from each family has been or is still working in Dakar. Many face physical and sexual abuse.

Parents are often ill-informed of the dangers their children face in the capital, or are so desperate for money they are willing to risk their child's welfare, says Seck. His team has to convince parents of the benefits of keeping their children in their village, which means offering them education opportunities and a way to make money closer to home.

"We are reaching out to parents to explain the dangers and risks to their children, so that they will ask their children to come back," he says. "We try to stop them from leaving and keep them in school."

Teenagers who are keen to head to the bright lights of the city, imagining opportunity, rather than exploitation, are taken on trips to Dakar to see the reality. Those who still wish to go are given advice on how to stay safe. "Every now and again, we do have children who make some success of themselves," says Seck. "We can't stop [them] from leaving, but we can prepare them and give them the skills, so they would not have to accept the worst kinds of work or conditions. We try to prepare them for their future."

The scheme is showing signs of success. Since it began in 2005, with a £30,000 grant, some 320 children have returned from Dakar and at least 180 more have been tracked down and want to come back home.

Problems across Africa

Child labour and poor access to education are common problems across Africa, but, in some ways, Senegal is in a better position than its neighbours. Independence from France in 1960 passed relatively smoothly and Senegal has no scars from civil war. In fact, the country is now seen as one of the most stable in Africa. However, it is still one of the poorest in the world, chiefly because it has limited natural resources and is predominantly rural. According to Unicef, 22% of the population live on less than a dollar a day.

The government has shown its commitment to education, allocating 40% of the budget to the sector, but the latest figures from the ministry of education show that only around 65% of children attend primary school. Just 21% continue on to secondary school and 9% pass the exam that allows them to complete their education.

Despite this, ministers have set ambitious targets. By 2010, they want to achieve universal primary education, five years before the Millennium Development Goal set by the UN. They also want to double the number of pupils completing secondary school and increase the number of students taking vocational qualifications from 3% to 25% within the next three years.

Unicef believes the primary goal is within the country's grasp, but a great deal more will need to be done by the government and outside donors to provide education opportunities to more young people. Opening the eyes of teenagers to the experiences of their contemporaries through projects such as Make the Link, and giving them the chance of a better life through training colleges is a small, yet significant, step in the right direction.

· www.plan-ed.org. Listen to the girls' stories in our online audio slideshow: EducationGuardian.co.uk/schoolsworldwide