An Amnesty International report published on Monday found that many children in Senegal’s Koranic schools continue to face multiple abuses as well as financial exploitation through forced begging. The human rights organisation is calling on the government to enforce existing conventions to better protect children.
In the Muslim-majority nation where religious leaders wield wide social and political influence, poor children have long been entrusted to Koranic schools, called daaras, for their education.
Amnesty said in a report that tens of thousands of students — known as “talibes” — “are forced to beg” as part of a system to bring teachers income.
The students also “face abuses from some Koranic teachers and their assistants,” the rights group said in the report.
Teachers told Amnesty that “shackling is a common practice, particularly for runaways, in order to prevent their escape”.
Last January, a 10-year-old student died from his injuries in the central city of Touba’s Lansar district after his teacher beat him for not having studied the day’s lesson.
Trafficking network
While there are no official statistics, estimates suggest there are more than 2,000 daaras with almost 200,000 talibes.
“Some 25 percent of these are thought to be forced to beg,” Amnesty said, quoting a so-called mapping exercise in 2018 by the NGO Global Solidarity Initiative (GSI).
(RFI)
