Malick Faye, Headmaster, Senegal

Despite all the positive things that World Links has brought to his teachers and students, Mr. Malick Faye argues that his life as a headmaster of Lycee Saidou Nourou Tall in Senegal has become untenable.  His school was one of the very first chosen to participate in the World Links Program 1997, because of good access to the telecommunications infrastructure and explicit financial support from the parent-teacher-association.  In fact, many of the “complaints” by the headmaster are related to increased involvement from parents in what is going on in the school.  Parents wholeheartedly agreed to pay additional tuition in order to cover additional electricity and telephone costs as a result of the World Links program.  In return, many parents started requesting that their children be allowed as much computer lab time as possible.  Another source of pressure on the headmaster is that being generated by the exponential number of registrants. Increasingly, the school has had to deal with more and more applications since word spread about World Links in the community.  “You can only deny so many applications”, sighs Mr. Faye.  Then he goes on to add “I wish I could afford three computer labs…”

Beneath the apparent complaints from the headmaster at Lycée Saidou Nourou Tall lie a lot of untold stories throughout the forty schools participating in World Links in Senegal.  In fact, responding to a growing demand from schools across the country, the Ministry of Education negotiated recently a new education project funded by the World Bank.  This project includes an ambitious plan to connect all three hundred-plus secondary schools throughout the country to the Internet, which would make Senegal the very first African country to have all its secondary schools connected to the Internet.