Caught in the cross-fire, growing up in Casamance

Despite two decades of instability and conflict, Senegal’s Casamance region has the highest proportion of children in schools than any other region of the country. Nationally 58 percent of Senegalese children attend primary school, but in the troubled Casamance region nearly 100 percent of boys and girls alike attend class, estimate the United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF). But that impressive record is under threat as 20 years of instability pulls this farming region into ever deepening poverty. “Taking into account the growing number of children and deepening war-related poverty, the situation is becoming more and more difficult. We are seeing children put to work in the street earlier and earlier – some as young as five years old. Some beg, other’s clean, some trail around military barracks,” said Albert Preira of UNICEF’s office in the main Casamance city of Ziguinchor. Last year UNICEF calculated there were 700 children working on the streets of Ziguinchor when they ought to have been in school. Rebels known as the Movement of the Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC) have waged a campaign for the independence of the Casamance region since 1982. Leaders of the MFDC signed a peace deal with the government of President Abdoulaye Wade last December but banditry and occasional clashes continue. A disarmament programme has never been launched to clear the area of weapons. Casamance is largely divided from the rest of Senegal by The Gambia, a finger of land just some 175 km long that cuts into Senegal from the coast. There is a cultural divide as well. Most of the people of the Casamance are Christian or Animist while the rest of Senegal is strongly Muslim. The MFDC rebels say Casamance has been marginalised and under-developed because of its differences.

Fatou Mane, wants to keep her children in school, but it's a struggle

The UN estimates that more than 60,000 people have fled from their homes in towns and villages across the lush farmland of the Casamance and joined the rows of homeless in Ziguinchor or in The Gambia to the north, or Guinea Bissau to the south. Fatou Mane and her husband did not have any children when they fled from their village after they say it was destroyed and fellow villagers massacred by the MFDC in 1986. Now a family of 13, the five adults and eight children live in one small dark room in the Nema 2 outlying district of Ziguinchor. Some 20 years on the family are still carrying the burden of the separatist rebellion, they say. They fret that their children will not be educated because they don't have the money to cover state school fees of CFA 2,500, or US $5, per child per year. Families typically get by on less than US $40 per month in Casamance. AN ALTERNATIVE, FREE OPTION To reverse the trend of children being put to work, the people of Nema 2 came together in an association and called on NGO Enda International to provide their children an alternative option to costly government schooling. Four schools in the town are now ‘alternative’ schools – that is they are not state run, though they follow the state curriculum and, most importantly, they are free. Since the programme was set up in 1996, each year between 150 and 200 displaced children living in the Nema 2 area have been educated for free. “We want to be people who can assume our own responsibilities, we want to have a good education,” said Honorine, who is 15 and going to school for free under the Enda programme. “We work hard all year through,” she said “because we want to go to college like other kids our age.” ab/ss/cs