A small African aid group credited with starting a grass roots campaign to abolish female circumcision in West Africa has been awarded the world's largest humanitarian prize, jurors said on Sunday.
The Senegal-based Tostan, which means 'breakthrough' in the local Wolof language, has been chosen for the $1.5 million Hilton Prize, whose past winners include the hospice movement, Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee.
The group, which has just 370 almost exclusively African staff, uses traditional song, poetry, theatre and dance to educate some of the poorest villagers in Senegal and neighbouring countries about development and human rights.
Founded in 1991 by Molly Melching, an American who has lived in Senegal for 32 years, one of Tostan's achievements has been to encourage thousands of women to speak out against female genital cutting, long a taboo subject in Muslim West Africa.
"There are many great things about Tostan and its leadership but the most important is (Melching's) freshness of approach and ability to think differently," Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, one of the Hilton Prize jurors, told Reuters.
"She has put new thought into the discussion about how you get a critical proportion of the population to agree and act in unison, to be an example to others," he said.
Tostan's grass roots approach, using indigenous African languages and working in the poorest communities, has drawn comparisons with the campaign to wipe out foot binding in China, once a similarly deeply-rooted cultural phenomenon.
When the women of Malicounda Bambara, a village south of Senegal's capital Dakar where Tostan is active, publicly abandoned female genital cutting 10 years ago, they were the first community in the region to do so.
