Every Saturday and Sunday afternoon while schools are in session, up to about 20 young people gather in the shaded rear yard of Fatou Janneh's quiet compound in Sukuta, a busy commercial and residential suburb of Banjul, the capital city of The Gambia. They are Salikenni Scholarship Fund students who attend high schools and colleges in the metropolitan area.

Fatou has been the Gambian manager of the scholarship program since 2005. She is an experienced teacher, recently head of the English department of a large middle school in Sukuta. She now is a senior officer in the Gambian Ministry of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology. She has an education degree from the University of The Gambia, and she frequently serves on committees in the Gambian education system and as a trainer of teachers.

The students come by bicycle, on foot or in the commercial minibuses that provide public transportation. They chat and make hasty additions in their notebooks. They roll mats out onto the bare ground and silently do the Muslim mid-day prayers in small groups. Fatou serves them a steaming meal, invariably rice with something such as meat or fish added. She reimburses them for their fares to come and go.

Then they all adjourn to a classroom in a nearby primary school where, on Saturday, they spend up to two hours studying math with a visiting tutor. On Sunday the subject will be English with Fatou Janneh herself.

These weekend sessions are more than tutorials. Fatou has instilled in the students a strong group loyalty and a system by which the older students mentor the younger ones.

The girls at these weekend lunches seem somewhat shy. Fatou encourages them to go as far as they possibly can in their education. A divorced mother of four, she tells them, "Husbands come and go, but your education will last forever."

Fatou has long been concerned about the poor housing conditions of our students in the urban area. She has taken one boy, with a particularly bad housing problem into her compound. She has urged the Fund to create a residence for our students in the metro area. She envisions it as a supervised "campus" which would have its own Internet café, allowing our students to learn computer technology and also earn income. We have considered this step but have not worked out the financing and management issues.