“Off the Backs of the Children”: Forced Begging and Other Abuses against Talibés in Senegal

Summary

At least 50,000 children attending hundreds of residential Quranic schools, or daaras, in Senegal are subjected to conditions akin to slavery and forced to endure often extreme forms of abuse, neglect, and exploitation by the teachers, or marabouts, who serve as their de facto guardians.  The government of Senegal has launched an initiative to create and subject to regulation 100 modern daaras between 2010 and 2012. While the regulation requirement in these new schools is a long-overdue measure, the limited number of daaras affected means that the plan will have little impact on the tens of thousands of talibés who are already living in exploitative daaras. The government must therefore couple efforts to introduce modern daaras with efforts, thus far entirely absent, to hold marabouts accountable for exploitation and abuse.