Author(s): Aimee Molloy

General

In 1974, American exchange student Molly Melching arrived in Senegal for a six-month program that would become a forty-year journey of transformation. Inspired by her experiences living in a remote village, she founded Tostan, an organization dedicated to empowering communities by using democracy and human-rights-based education to promote relationships built upon dignity, equality, and respect.Tostan's groundbreaking strategies have led to better education for the women of rural Africa, improved health care, a decrease in child/forced marriage, and declarations by thousands of African communities to abandon the practice of female genital cutting. However Long the Night is the story of how Melching, named by Newsweek and the Daily Beast as one of the "150 women who shake the world," is paving the way to a world with human dignity for all.