As shameful as the act of street begging has been painted, especially for children, who should be in school to acquire useful education, to better their lives and possibly add up to the prosperity of the country, youngsters are still been found loitering about the neighborhood, in Senegal, begging for alms.
This is even more worrisome, as the rise in recent times has been shooting beyond bearable limits. Despite governmental efforts to limit this detrimental activity since 2016, in which a drive to get “talibes”, as these children were popularly called, off the streets of Senegal. Talibes are children in the West African countries mostly sent to schools called daaras where they are coerced to the streets, to get money for their teachers.
Failure to bring in about 2,000 CFA francs ($3) in a day for the “marabouts” (their teachers) earn them endless beatings and punishments. This act as estimated by the United Nations (U.N.) generate at least $8 million in a year for their sinister teachers over the surroundings of Dakar.
On a visitation to Daara by Thomson Reuters Foundation, reports gathered tells of several barefooted, shabby, unkempt children found roaming in day and sleeping when it’s night on commercial roads and grounds. These children were reported to be cholera-prone due to the inaccessibility to water supply and even toilet facilities. They suffer and fall ill due to poor hygiene.
A throwback into 2016 shows the evacuation of almost one thousand and five hundred children from Dakar. In June, it was reported that these children were ported back to their parents.
It’s however funny that more than one thousand talibes were retrieved back by their teachers, in the absence of investigations or arrests. The previous year documented the deaths of two talibes, five cases of sexual abuse and twenty eight incidents of beating. However, there are likely to be more cases in the previous year as the documentation above was the only that could be retrieved.
