We Talk. We Unite. We Heal.
About WASSOR Womanity
We are a Senegalese-led organisation working at the intersection of mental health, women's empowerment, and community-led development. We are grassroots, grounded in lived experience, and rigorous in method.
Where we started
WASSOR was founded by Bineta Gueye Thiam, a psychologist who grew up understanding the structural invisibility of women's psychological distress worldwide and in particular in the Senegalese society. Divorced women, widows, single mothers, women carrying caring responsibilities, incarcerated women, women who have been sectioned, women migrants/refugees — these women exist at the margins of mental health provision, not because their need is smaller, but because the systems were not built with them in mind. WASSOR began as a community conversation — literally. We ran online spaces where experts and people with lived experience came together to talk, openly and without stigma, about psychological distress. We have reached close to half a million people through this work. From those conversations grew the programmes, the partnerships, and the research infrastructure that define WASSOR today.
A credentialed, funded organisation with active programmes
Today, WASSOR holds a Grand Challenges Canada grant for the Empower Minds Initiative — a digital mental health programme for youth in Senegal. We have signed institutional partnerships with the Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale and are in active collaboration with lecturers from the University of East London. Our Womanity programme operates across a few regions of Senegal with integrated health, economic, and psychosocial components. We are a small organisation doing serious work, and we are growing deliberately — maintaining the community trust and ethical rigour that makes our model different.
What makes WASSOR different
Community-led, not community-targeted
We do not arrive with a model and ask communities to fit into it. We recognise what already exists — the kafoo cooperatives, the women's networks, the intergenerational ecological knowledge — and build infrastructure around it.
Decolonial and Womanist ethics
Our methods are grounded in Africana Womanism and Participatory Action Research. The communities we work with are not beneficiaries. They are knowledge holders, co-investigators, and the architects of their own solutions.
Academically rigorous
Our work is underpinned by culturally validated tools, and participatory methodologies. We generate evidence that belongs to the community and is legible to funders and policymakers.
Trauma-informed throughout
Across every programme and every interaction, we are guided by a commitment to reducing re-victimisation and honouring the dignity and autonomy of the people we work with.
How we work
- Respect — for the dignity, privacy, and autonomy of every individual and community we work with
- Integrity — we interrogate our own positionality and are honest about our competencies and limitations
- Transparency — in our internal decision-making and in all external interventions
- Trauma-informed care — we do everything we can to reduce re-victimisation
- Liberation-centred — we believe in the capability of our communities to bring about change for themselves and future generations