Over the last fifteen years, Le Korsa has made marked strides in improving early and primary education in Tambacounda’s rural villages. Many of them lack kindergartens, so students share primary school classrooms or use temporary structures built from wooden posts and thatch. Our first school construction project was a kindergarten in Sinthian in 2010, and our efforts have expanded from there.

We built the first ever school in Fass, which opened in 2018 and is transforming life in the village by bringing basic literacy to students who previously only received a Quranic education. Thanks to the Clara Lionel Foundation, we built an additional three rural schools near Sinthian, where students were attending classes in makeshift structures.

We have launched an annual academic supplies program for the seven village schools surrounding Sinthian, purchasing the materials in bulk to reduce costs, and ensuring that each and every student has all the pens, pencils, notebooks and protractors they need to start the year. Many families in this rural region cannot afford these items otherwise.

At Les Foyers des Tambacounda, we house 144 young women from rural villages who come to the city to attend secondary school, and support them with a range of extracurricular programs, including job trainings, art classes, and creative writing workshops. Many of these young women are now going on to college, so we have opened an extension of the Foyer in Dakar, where the graduates can continue living together in a supportive community while attending university in the capital.