Molly Melching, director of Tostan, a literacy and skills training program built around group discussion, whose clients have been the initiators of the reform process, tells me that the correspondence between the convention model and the events she is witnessing is astonishing and even eerie. The mass abandonments appear to be so nearly miraculous that responsible outsiders in the aid agencies and the media are likely to judge these events to be eccentric and ephemeral rather than as the spark that ignites a prairie fire as with the end of footbinding in China. That is why it is worth emphasizing that the convention model predicts and confirms the success of the process devised and carried out by the villages in Senegal. In China, the success of the pledge technique was discovered locally in 1874, but was not implemented nationally for another twenty years. My wish is that the success of the Malicounda Commitment be understood and replicated now rather than twenty years from now.
Some qualifications are in order.
The events in Senegal follow from a larger process of emerging public deliberation in the villages, a direct consequence of the Tostan basic education program. Tostan provides training in personal skills, organizational skills, health, hygiene, and human rights, but never tells people what to do. The women of Malicounda decided on their own that ending FGC was a priority, and invented the commitment method themselves. The other villages have learned from that example, but have independently debated and decided the issue each on its own. Public discussion reveals previously hidden costs of FGC, and allows people wanting to end FGC to find one another and to carry their message to others.