Fighting For Child Beggars in Senegal

Antoinette Zoumanigui, C’17, studies forced child begging in Senegal, working to galvanize change for the young children engaged in it. The phenomenon centers on Muslim child disciples—talibés—who beg to support their Qur’anic education. Mostly boys ages 4-18, talibés are sent by their parents to Qur’anic schools, or daaras. Run by marabouts, religious leaders charged with fostering these young students, daaras are unregulated—yet culturally significant—institutions in Senegal.

Historically, when daaras were located in rural areas of Senegal, talibés spent annual harvest seasons collecting food from local villages to sustain their schools and teachers. In the 20th century, as marabouts relocated their schools to cities, alms collecting became more exploitive and abusive. Food gathering in close-knit rural communities evolved into begging for money on congested urban streets. Today, UNICEF estimates that in the country’s capital, Dakar, 90,000 talibés roam the city for hours daily.

Zoumanigui’s concern for talibés took root when she herself was a child in Senegal. “Children came to my family’s door, and we gave them sugar and rice,” she says. “Although pervasive, I couldn’t have really understood the gravity of the situation at that age. I really started thinking seriously about what I could do when I was a freshman in 2013 and saw news coverage of a horrible fire that killed nine talibés.”

In response, Zoumanigui, who was 10 when she emigrated to the U.S., founded a nonprofit called Kids of Dakar to support projects that help these Senegalese children. And the health and societies major, international relations minor, is establishing herself as an expert on child welfare issues in her homeland. This year, Brill’s International Journal of Children’s Rights has published her paper “On the Talibé Phenomenon: A Look into the Complex Nature of Forced Child Begging in Senegal,” putting her work in front of global children’s rights advocates, academics, and policy makers.

The paper was the culmination of research that Zoumanigui began her first year at Penn. “To really know how to help, I needed to see what had been said about the talibé phenomenon and then identify what was missing,” she explains. “I spent a year reviewing existing thought and research and found that much of it focuses on the horrible conditions talibés live under. While cognizant of these conditions, no one is really talking about why the phenomenon still persists. That felt important to answer.”

In 2015, she received a Hassenfeld Foundation Social Impact grant for fieldwork in Senegal to explore the question. On the ground, she spoke with religious leaders, government officials, and citizens, as well as local and international NGOs, to understand how this centuries-old phenomenon has evolved with modernization and urbanization, popular attitudes toward the practice, and barriers to change these attitudes create.

Her paper “On the Talibé Phenomenon” presents four factors that perpetuate forced child begging. First is parental motivation. Muslim parents hold religious education as a great mark of honor, proudly sending their children to daaras. Next, Senegalese people believe the giving of alms is good citizenship, which can translate into desensitization to the plight of talibés begging for alms. Third, transnational and local advocacy organizations have the will to help child beggars but fear addressing the socio-cultural origins and significance of alms begging, focusing instead on structural forces like poverty. And, finally, Zoumanigui notes the lack of accountability from government and religious authorities for the abusive nature of the phenomenon.
 
Given this framework, she suggests that solutions to the growing humans rights issue can come only from earnest collaboration and frank and honest conversation among all stakeholders—families, government, marabouts, and NGOs—about the controversial nature of child begging.

Initially, Zoumanigui planned to present about her fieldwork at Penn. But her mentor Cheikh Babou, associate professor of history, and Latin American history teaching assistant, Tom Brinkerhoff, GR’23, suggested a paper as well. “I wrote and submitted it and time passed,” Zoumanigui remembers. “Then, after class one day, I received Brill’s acceptance email. This was very exciting!”

This has been a big year for the rising senior, who also earned a 2016 Projects for Peace prize. Zoumanigui and classmates Selamawit Bekele, C’17 will use the prize to develop a health program for street children in Saly Mbour, Senegal. And Zoumanigui is conducting her own research on the broader system of child fosterage in Sub-Saharan Africa.