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.

A village lane.

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 year two of our students are enrolled in the university. Two others are attending a university access program to improve their English and math and will probably be fully admitted next academic year. Several others, who are finishing high school this year, are promising candidates for higher education.

We currently sponsor 65 students. Of these, 31 are in grades 7-9 at the Salikenni village school; 24 attend middle and high schools, mainly in the capital city, Banjul, and its suburbs, and 10 are in various programs of higher education within The Gambia.

We invite you to meet these students and learn about their backgrounds and their hopes by going to Meet Our Students. You will find essays by some of our students under In Their Own Words. 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.

Students in the Salikenni school library.

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.) With the help of a generous grant from U.S. and Canadian school children, described below, we now have three laptop computers with internet access for these students in the urban area.
  
  
  
  SSF students learning geometry on the internet.
• We know that our scholarship students will have a better chance of success in high school and college if they receive a good foundation in the primary and middle grades in the village. To that end, we have facilitated a series of visits by experienced American teachers to Salikenni. They have opened a dialogue with Salikenni teachers on topics including the teaching of reading in the early grades and the development of reading comprehension and writing skills in grades 7-9.

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.

Thanks

In August, 2009, we received a grant of $1,700 from Operation Days Work U.S.A. to provide computer equipment and internet access for some of our students. ODW, which began in Norway in the 1960s, is an organization essentially run by school children. Students at participating schools select projects in developing countries, learn about those countries and then hold Work Days to raise money. This particular grant came from students at Thetford Academy, Thetford, VT; Broad Meadows Middle School, Quincy, MA, and the Sacred Heart School, Mildman, Ontario, Canada. This has helped us to improve our computer capability for our urban area students.

Our continuing thanks to our loyal donors, many of whom have supported the program for more than a decade. And we offer special thanks to some new contributors, including: