SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR
AFRICA’S DAUGHTER
Bineta Diop has spent a lifetime campaigning for women’s rights and an end to violence in Africa
ineta Diop dreams of tending an allotment when she finally retires. She will grow vegetables and fruit, she says, switch off the phone, read books and have her multitude of grandchildren visit her. But months after turning 65, the president of the women’s campaign group Femmes Africa Solidarite (FAS) and the African Union’s special envoy for women, peace and security is showing no signs of slowing down. “I am tired but not retired,” she says. “I said before that I would retire when I was 65. That was my thing and my children said, ‘We’ve heard that song—before it was when you are 50, now you talk about when you are 65,’ so I don’t give an age any more.” But if the Senegalese peace campaigner and activist refuses to take a step back, it is because she says there is still much to do on the continent. Diop—whose first name, like the Arabic ‘bint’, means daughter—founded FAS two decades ago after 20 years of
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working as a human rights campaigner. She was made an African Union (AU) special envoy in 2014, a role which has seen her criss-crossing the continent from her homes in Geneva and Dakar, while she also spends time in Addis Ababa. “My base is a plane,” she says. “I do not know where home is. If home is where your books are, everything is divided between Geneva and Dakar. “Now I also do a stopover in Addis and I also live in my country of origin, Senegal.” Diop is at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) in Doha, Qatar, where she is speaking about a masters degree programme she initiated in partnership with universities in Senegal and Costa Rica to teach the kind of mediation skills needed to “configure resolution. If we are talking about peace deals, they need particular skills”. The salubrious setting of the Qatar National Convention Centre is in stark contrast to her previous mission. Three days earlier Diop was in Bangui, the capital of the
Images courtesy of Getty Images
BY TAHIRA YAQOOB