Undergraduate Leah Bjornson’s six weeks in the West African Republic of Senegal to participate in the Uniterra International Seminar were life changing, she says.  

Bjornson travelled to Senegal this past summer with funding from SFU’s Student International Mobility Fund.

She was among 12 Canadian students chosen to work with 12 partner students in Senegal on three Uniterra field projects related to youth employability, food security and Senegal’s unusual social-solidarity economy.

Bjornson worked on the youth employability project, discovering that 60 per cent of Senegalese aged 18-35 years are unemployed.

“Even though many have degrees, there just aren’t jobs,” she says. “The training isn’t relevant to the jobs actually available in the workforce. Everybody wants to be a lawyer, but only three out of 97 will get a job. Whereas there are hundreds of jobs in agriculture.”

Her research group’s report recommended delivering educational programs in schools that explain where the jobs are, and then training students for those jobs.

“There’s no connection between training and real-world expectations,” she says.

Bjornson says her biggest take-away from the seminar was the reality of living in a developing country.

“All we see of Africa as a continent is what we see in World Vision commercials, which isn’t the reality,” she says. “The students we worked with there were students like you find at SFU — incredibly ambitious and intelligent. The only difference is the circumstances we’ve been born into. We have so many more privileges in Canada.”

She also experienced sexism in this predominantly Moslem country.

“It was extremely difficult at times because we women felt like second-class citizens who weren’t heard and our ideas weren’t respected. It gave me second thoughts about having a career abroad.”

With a major in international studies and a double minor in political science and French, Bjornson originally anticipated a career in diplomacy or international development. Now, she is more interested in pursuing a career in journalism where, she says, “I can bring these experiences home and share an awareness of what’s actually going on.”