Collaborating for collective impact
Past recipients of the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize—an exemplary group of organizations with diverse missions and areas of focus—are partnering for greater impact. Through the power of the collective, they aim to increase awareness in the developed world about problems—and solutions—in the developing world.
Tostan–Operation Smile collaboration in Senegal
By Molly Melching
Founder and Executive Director, Tostan
In 2002, when Tostan was working in the rural village of Keur Thione Sarr, I was approached by a villager in distress, who urged:
Come to my house and look at my daughter. What can you do? How can you help me? I know that Tostan works on health education, but we need more than just health education for our daughter, so what can you do?
Little Mbayang Diouf had a cleft palate and suffered from facial disfigurement. My organization focuses on basic education and preparing communities to lead their own development—but nothing like this. I had no idea how to give this family the help they needed for their daughter.
When Tostan received the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize in 2007, we began discussing potential partnerships with past Prize recipients. In 2008, we began a partnership with the Heifer Foundation, which supports Prize recipient Heifer International, and we had good conversations with many others.
Operation Smile in Senegal
Mbayang Diouf in Keur Thione Sarr several days after her operation.
In 2008, Operation Smile decided to make its services available in Senegal for the first time. Because I've been in Senegal for 35 years and Tostan has been active in all regions and the sub-regional area of the country, we decided to collaborate. Tostan helped Operation Smile locate an adequate hospital where the organization could operate on children with cleft palates in the city of Thies. Tostan has a training center next to the hospital, so we housed all 50 members of the Operation Smile team, while the Peace Corps provided housing for the families that arrived with their children from all over Senegal to receive surgery and care for severe cleft conditions. To help people understand this opportunity newly available in Senegal, Tostan promoted it on radio porgrams and abundant posters. Seventy patients arrived the first day Operation Smile opened for service. I remember one young man who walked all the way from Guinea to be operated on.
The very first patient to see Operation Smile in Senegal was Mbayang Diouf. When I first learned that Operation Smile was going to come, I immediately went to Mbayang's village to see how she was doing and to announce to her that she would undergo a radical and positive life change. I told her family to take very special care of her—to do their best to keep her from catching a cold, which would delay surgery. Mbayang's operation took place eight years after we first met. To this day, she wears her bracelet from the hospital.
Mbayang Diouf with her mother, father, and brother, 8 months after her operation.
After Mbayang's operation, Tostan invited Dr. Peterson, a member of the Operation Smile team, to come and see the community's response to the organization's work. Although she had been well accepted by community members, Mbayang had never been able to leave her village due to social stigmas associated with her disfigurement. The surgery improved her quality of life dramatically. The entire village came out to welcome Mbayang home—and to sing and dance for the good work of Operation Smile.
I returned to Mbayang's village recently to learn about her new experience within the community. Her face is no longer disfigured, and she is thrilled.
Tostan continues to receive phone calls from the 70 patients who came for that Operation Smile visit and we are repeatedly assured that all of us involved in this partnership will go to heaven! My thanks go to Operation Smile and the other Hilton Humanitarian Prize recipients—partners and future partners that strengthen our work.
If 10 people dig, but 10 people fill in, there will be lots of dust, but there will be no hole.
—Senegalese proverb
In collaborating, Humanitarian Prize recipients have learned to dig together in harmony. Acting together in this way, we make real progress for the world.
Molly Melching, Founder and Executive Director, Tostan
Having lived and worked in Senegal for more than 30 years, Molly Melching has dedicated her life to empowering communities at the grassroots level. She has created two original basic education programs for women, adolescent girls, and their communities. Highly regarded for her expertise in nonformal education, human rights training, and social transformation, Melching's work with Tostan has brought her international attention for cross-cutting results in many areas of development—including reductions in infant and maternal mortality, widespread school and birth registration, the emergence of female leadership, the abandonment of female genital cutting and child/forced marriage within more than 3,800 communities in Senegal, Guinea, and Burkina Faso. Melching received the Humanitarian Alumni Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999 and the Sargent Shriver Distinguished Award for Humanitarian Service in 2002. In 2005, she was awarded Sweden's Anna Lindh Award for Tostan's work in human rights.