The Salikenni
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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 1994, 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 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:
Fatou Janneh is the manager of the program in The Gambia. Read about her under Our Manager.
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The Salikenni Scholarship Fund c/o Don and Alison May, P.O. Box 742, Norwich, VT 05055 U.S.A. Telephone: 802 649-8294 don@salikenni.org |
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