We Talk. We Unite. We Heal.
Our Work
WASSOR runs three interconnected programmes in Senegal. Each is distinct. Each is necessary. Together they represent one coherent commitment: that women's knowledge, dignity, and collective intelligence are the foundation of community health.
Empower Minds Initiative
The Empower Minds Initiative is a digital mental health programme for youth in Senegal, combining an AI-powered chatbot (Maguette), culturally validated psychosocial tools, and a mobile application deployed on Android and iOS. It is designed to reach young people — and the teachers, caregivers, and peer facilitators around them — with accessible, culturally grounded mental health support.
What it involves
- An AI-powered chatbot and mobile app, adapted for the cultural and linguistic context of Senegal.
- Validated mental health screening tools, translated, culturally adapted, and validated through rounds of Delphi methodology.
- Usability testing with young people, with generally positive early results.
- Training of 200+ intermediaries — teachers, NGO representatives, and peer facilitators — in partnership with the Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale and lecturers from the University of East London.
- Full public launch planned for June 2026.
Academic partnership
The intermediary training programme is being co-developed and delivered with Professor Rachel Tribe and Dr Claire Marshall from the University of East London and Senegalese Counselling psychologists from cnosp — local and internationally recognised experts in applied psychology, mental health, and working with diverse communities.
Womanity — Casamance Programme
The Casamance Programme is an integrated response to one living reality: the women of Boukilin and Maranda, who work the land, sustain their communities, and face simultaneously the pressures of climate change, land insecurity, male migration, and inadequate maternal health infrastructure. It comprises three interlocking projects.
Project 1: The Boukilin-Maranda Agricultural Cooperative
Built on the kafoo - the Mandinka collective work groups through which women have organised labour, shared knowledge, and held each other accountable for generations - WASSOR is accompanying the formalisation of this cooperative through Participatory Action Research. The founding act is the documentation of the women's intergenerational ecological knowledge: precision environmental science, held collectively, transmitted orally across generations. This knowledge becomes the cooperative's primary asset and its argument for collective land rights.
Project 2: Maranda Poste de Sante
Maranda (population - 4,000) currently has only a basic health hut. WASSOR is working with local partners to mobilise funding for a full maternal and community health post, with a dedicated space for WASSOR's psychosocial programmes embedded within it.
Project 3: Psychosocial Programming
Operating from the anchor space within the health post, WASSOR's psychosocial layer is the connective tissue between the cooperative's economic work and the health post's medical services - the space where women are accompanied as whole people, not as patients or beneficiaries.
Womanity — Touba: Therapeutic Community for Widows
In Touba, one of Senegal's most significant cities and the spiritual heart of the Mouride Sufi brotherhood, widows face a specific and largely invisible crisis. Islamic mourning practice - the idda - provides a structured container for grief lasting four months and ten days. When it ends, the institutional support of the community ends with it.
WASSOR's response is not a clinic, a shelter, or a service delivery programme. It is a therapeutic community: a permanent communal infrastructure built around the Mouride ethic of jel- jef (collective labour and mutual obligation), where widows grieve together, work together, and rebuild together. This work is guided by a mentor from the Khalif's lineage - the daughter of the 5th Khalif - whose presence means this work is recognised and carried by the community's own spiritual authority.
How we think
All of WASSOR's programmes are grounded in two complementary traditions:
Africana Womanism
Positions the women we work with not as vulnerable recipients but as knowledge holders whose experience contains the theory of their own healing.
Participatory Research
Communities are co-investigators, the knowledge generated belongs to them, and oral and embodied methods are not accommodations but the epistemology itself.