Our Mission:
Friends of Guéoul empowers young women in Senegal to achieve lifelong independence and success by creating access to education, annual scholarships, and targeted learning enrichment programs through high school graduation.
2026 Milestones & Impact 🇸🇳
21 Years of Impact: Celebrating over two decades of advancing girls' education in Senegal—reaching 270+ students to date.
Sustained Graduation Excellence: Maintaining a 47% high school diploma success rate, significantly outperforming regional averages and driving long-term community transformation.
Near-Zero Dropout Rate: Our Field Director, Makhfou Diop, reports near-zero dropouts in recent years—proving the lasting power of stable, quality educational support.
Official NGO Status: Formalized our non-governmental organization (NGO) application within Senegal to expand our local reach and operations.
Expanded STEM Curriculum: Partnered with the Agilent Foundation—thanks to Board member Ibrahima Gueye—to deliver hands-on STEM education for middle and high schoolers.
In-Country Leadership: Our local, primarily female board in Guéoul continues to design tailored programs designed to optimize student success.
Strategic Partnerships: Executive Director and Field Director Makhfou Diop collaborated with key Senegalese NGOs to open new educational pathways for our scholars.
On-the-Ground Storytelling: On-site photographer and Social Media Manager Maty Thiam leads our multimedia storytelling in French to highlight our mission directly from Guéoul.
Global Student Exchange: Entering the third year of our cross-cultural exchange, connecting scholarship holders directly with visiting students from a Kansas French immersion school.
The Statistics Speak Volumes
Our longtime board member and Senior Research Associate at the University of Denver's Pardee Institute for International Futures, Janet Dickson, led an analysis of the long-term educational outcomes for the girls in our first entering cohorts.
Initial Outcomes: High School Completion 🎓The initial analysis tracked the 48 girls who started the program between 2005 and 2008—the first group old enough to have completed 13 years of primary and secondary education.
Of these girls, 38 percent (18) completed the upper secondary level, achieving high school graduation. This represents a monumental success when compared to data from the World Bank Education Statistics, which reports the high school completion rate for rural, low-income females in Senegal at less than one percent.
Moreover, our students are graduating at more than double the rate of urban Senegalese females across all income categories, which stands at 17 percent.
Post-Secondary AchievementThe achievement continues past high school: an astounding 17 of the 18 young women who graduated from high school have gone on to pursue post-secondary education at either a university or a trade school.
Latest Cohort Success
We are thrilled to report an even higher graduation rate for our subsequent cohorts (2007–2009), reaching a full 47 percent!
While more recent comparative data for high school graduation rates in low-income rural Senegal are unavailable, a 2023 UNESCO-UIS report provides a telling measure: only 21 percent of high-school-age girls across all of Senegal are enrolled at the high school level. This is in sharp contrast to our 2007–2009 cohorts, where 56 percent of the girls had at least some upper secondary education and 47 percent had graduated (with one student still enrolled). This comparison is particularly favorable, given that the UNESCO data includes urban areas, which typically have much higher enrollment rates than rural ones.Our Future:
We know from our local team of supporters, parents, teachers and village elders, that so much more can be done.
We envision a future where all girls in Gueoul have access to education. To make this dream a reality,
We are actively seeking funding in Senegal and abroad to increase program capacity. Our goals are to enhance graduation rates, offer career counseling, mentoring, experiential learning, ESL, teacher training, and more scholarships.
I invite you to explore further our Annual Report to delve deeper into our organization.
Together, we are all Friends of Gueoul!
THANK YOU for considering a contribution to Friends of Guéoul! We appreciate YOU!
Friends of Guéoul enables female students in Senegal to achieve economic and life successes by creating access to education through annual scholarships and learning enrichment opportunities to pursue education through high school.
When one looks at a lifetime of events, all the coincidences and serendipities take shape. Time reveals that circumstances could never have turned out any other way.
In 1990, co-founder Judy Beggs embarked on a new journey that took her to Guéoul. She was welcomed into a family and over the next two years, she created a special bond that would last a lifetime.
Initially, Judy was working on a Rural Health Education project and picked up Wolof and French. But it was heard she learned that many girls were not attending school. Once she returned to the U.S., Judy began supporting a few children of the family she stayed with to attend school.
After hearing of Judy’s efforts, John Montaña (Co-Founder) said, “Let’s keep a bunch of them in school!” and that is where Friends of Guéoul was born.
Together John and Judy saw the importance and the opportunity to promote education for girls who needed it most. Over the following years, Friends of Guéoul flourished and girls began to gain access to education.
Judy Beggs died in 2020, just one year after hiring Friends of Guéoul's first paid Executive Director, Elke McGuire. With true dedication, John, Elke, and the heart-warmingly dedicated Board of Directors has persevered to take Friends of Gueoul from Judy's kitchen table to an updated international non-profit. Today, we are still growing and are thrilled to be a part of this work.
Organization name
Friends of Guéoul
other names
FoG
2005
Tax id (EIN)
83-0430609
Category
Education, International, Foreign Affairs & National Security, Youth Development
Organization Size
Medium Organization
Address
124 Cheyenne BoulevardDenver County, CO, US
SN
Louga, Louga Region, SN