During these first few months of service, I have learned there are a plethora of PC Senegal efforts that coincide with our primary four fields of service (Agriculture, Health, Environmental Education, and Community Economic Development), but don’t necessary have a dedicated corps of volunteers.
One of these groups is known as SeneGAD. To briefly explain what SeneGAD is, I have paraphrased information from the SeneGAD blog:
SeneGAD is a country-wide initiative organized by Peace Corps Senegal volunteers to focus and tackle gender issues in our communities. The mission of SeneGAD is to empower Senegalese women, men and youth to effectively integrate gender equality into their daily lives, with the support of Peace Corps Volunteers. The committee provides resources and support to volunteers to enable their activities as well as coordinating and managing large-scale projects that volunteers around the country participate in.
In August, I joined the SeneGAD committee as a regional representative for the volunteers located in the Thies and Dakar regions and attended my first quarterly meeting the end of October. As a regional representative my duties include:
(1) motivating volunteers in your region to report GADeeds
(2) attending and participating in quarterly meetings;
(3) submitting updates to the communications coordinators to use in the GAD Gab, our bi-annual newsletter; and
(4) acting as a liaison for a girls’ scholarship fund.
The meeting was really interesting and I need to start doing my part! One project that is receiving a surge in promotion is “MAP”, the Men As Partners training. It is the chance to have a male Peace Corps Senegal Cultural Facilitator come to your site and address a group of young men to talk about the role of males in Senegal. It was developed with the aim to help motivate men in Senegal to be strong role models in their community. There are several activities geared towards girls and young women (for instance, the Girls Leadership Camp that took place in September where I worked for a few days as a supporting Counselor), so the board of SeneGAD is trying to equal the scales by promoting male-orientated talks. During the meeting, it was also brought to the attention of the group that SeneGAD has come scrutiny for demonstrating the impact that they have. This coincides with the emphasis that PC SN has on Monitoring and Evaluation techniques. While it feels a bit like being scolded, it will ultimately be a great practice in creating quantitative data for all the good that the committee does perform year after year. I’m looking forward to attending future meetings and playing my part in helping to coordinate activities and see that SeneGAD continues for generations of volunteers to come!
To read more about SeneGAD, check out the blog: http://senegad.wordpress.com/ .
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