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

We provide scholarships to selected boys and girls in the village, starting when they are in grade 7. That is the point at which fees charged by Gambian government schools rise to a level that many families cannot afford, causing many children to drop out of school.

Our students are selected by a village committee consisting of three village residents and three teachers in the local school. There are two selection criteria: financial need and, within that group, academic ability.

We pay their tuition through grade 9 in the local government school and from there through high school, usually in the Banjul metropolitan area. There is no high school in the village. If they qualify, we sponsor our high school graduates in higher education within The Gambia.

We currently sponsor 42 students in Salikenni, 13 in metropolitan area high schools and 8 in business colleges and other institutions of higher learning within the country - a total 63 students.

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.

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 provide after-school tutoring classes for our students in Salikenni, in English and math, the two subjects they find most difficult. We also provide weekend tutoring for our students in the metropolitan area.
  
  
• We have gradually built up a library in the Salikenni village school. We pay the salary of a full-time librarian. We hope the library will be used for story hours for young children and that it will help foster the habit of reading among the entire student body and faculty at the school.
  
  
• 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 most recent of these visiting educators was Robert Scobie, a retired teacher who lives in Hanover, NH, and who hopes to return to the village this coming fall. You can read his insights about education in a rural African setting through the menu at left.

Fatou Janneh, a full-time teacher in a large middle school in Sukuta in the Banjul metropolitan area, is the manager of the program in The Gambia.

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