The Salikenni Scholarship Fund is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing educational opportunity for boys and girls in the village of Salikenni in the rural North Bank region of The Gambia in West Africa.

We provide scholarships for selected students, starting in seventh grade at the Salikenni village school. That is the point  at which fees charged by Gambian government schools rise to a level which many families cannot afford, causing children to drop out of school.

We tell all of our incoming students that, if they succeed, we will sponsor them through high school, usually in the Banjul metropolitan area, since there is no high school in the village, and then into higher education, including the University of The Gambia.

This school year, 2011-12, we are sponsoring 55 students, including 31 in grades 7-9 in Salikenni; 17 in the urban area, mainly in high schools; and 7 at the University of The Gambia.

We invite you to meet these students and learn about their backgrounds and their hopes by going to Meet Our Students. For much more information about the program see our Annual Reports.

Don and Alison May of Norwich, VT, are the U.S. administrators of the program. Don first visited the village in 1990, while traveling in Africa as a reporter. He met children who had been sent home from school for arrears in tuition. The scholarship program began on a small scale in 1996.

We soon realized that it was not enough just to pay tuition. Many of our students were failing the exams which Gambian students must pass in order to go from ninth grade into high school, and from high school into higher education. In an effort to help our students succeed in their education, we have launched over the years a series of additional efforts:

• We have gradually built up a library in the Salikenni village school. We pay the salary of a full-time librarian. The library program includes story hours for young children. We hope the library will foster the habit of reading among the entire student body and faculty at the school.
  
• We provide weekend classes in English and math for our students in the metropolitan area, who meet at the home of our manager,  Fatou Janneh. (See Our Manager.) We have provided several laptop computers with internet access for use by these students in the urban area.
  
  
  
  SSF students learning geometry on the internet.
• We have two tutoring programs underway this year for our scholarship students in Salikenni. Ansumana Fatty, a former student of ours, is holding after-school classes for them four days a week in English and math. Meanwhile, our librarian, Fatou Darboe, is working individually and in small groups with our 7th grade girls in Salikenni to improve their reading.

The fact that so many of our students have reached higher education is a measure of success, but it also raises our costs. For details of how to contribute, by check or online, please go to Contact Us and Contribute.

The Fund is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which means contributions to it are tax deductible.