Khalidou collects his prize at the awards ceremony.
Tostan former National Coordinator for Senegal and member of our staff for 25 years, Khalidou Sy, was honored on Friday November 9, 2018, as one of the best mayors in Senegal at the Local Leadership Excellence Award Ceremony. He was selected out of 557 Local District Mayors in the country.
Three awards were given in each of six categories:
1) Participation and commitment of citizens and communities; 2) Transparency and accountability; 3) Inclusion, equality, and equity; 4) Budgetary efficiency; 5) Solidarity and assistance to vulnerable communities; 6) Decentralization of public policies and international development agendas.
Khalidou, who has been the Mayor of Medina Yoro Foulah, in Senegal, for three years, was one of three Mayors who won for Transparency and Accountability.
The Local Leadership Excellence Award Ceremony was a three-day event designed as a learning space on good governance, participation and civic engagement – encouraging people to share, disseminate and prioritize best practices and innovations related to local participatory governance.
Khalidou has recently been working as a consultant with Tostan and was involved in developing a new module on how Local District Councils can better understand and actively participate in the decentralization process – and he himself trained eight Local District Councils in his region. Through this new initiative in collaboration with an exemplary Mayor, Tostan has been able to make important headway in the area of support to community development, defining and promoting a model of decentralization that engages citizens and places particular emphasis on the participation of women and children. Tostan is currently designing a program to scale our impact in social norms change, and will be testing this in 2019 with the participation of Khalidou and community members in Medina Yoro Foula.
Khalidou speaking in his previous role as Tostan Senegal National Coordinator.
