Baaba Maal Music Festival Highlights Education in Senegal's Fouta Region

Friday January 01, 2010

Senegalese musician Baaba Maal is using an annual music festival to focus on education in the country’s remote northern regions.

At Baaba Maal’s fourth annual “Festival les Blues du Fleuve,” musicians from around West Africa gathered along the Senegal River to play traditional rhythms and modern beats before thousands of spectators. But they were also there to draw attention to issues of education – a topic of increasing relevance to people in northern Senegal.

As one of Africa’s most acclaimed musicians and a youth ambassador for the United Nations Development Program, Maal is using the music festival, in his hometown of Podor, to talk about the future of the region’s children.

“I think education is one of the most important gifts that we can send to the next generation, in order to pass to the next generation, because I believe that without education the next generation in Africa will not be able to understand what’s going on in the whole world and how to go into it and how to exchange ideas, how to use the modern way of communicating to be part of the world. I think education is really, really a key to develop the mind and to develop the spirit and to be free for a lot of things,” he said.

Dakar Moon	3:15	Baaba Maal
Television	7:07	Baaba Maal

[+] open in new window

Watch what's on

Television
Dakar Moon

[+] open in new window

News Archive

IMN - International Music Network