Marie Delphine Ndiaye comes from a family of nine children. As the daughter of educators, she along with her brothers and sisters received regular schooling up to university level.
In addition, she is a lawyer by training, as well as a tax and commercial expert. She is one of the first women to have embraced this profession in the country.
Ndiaye read a lot of the first Senegalese female intellectuals, Aminata Sow Fall and Mariama Ba, who deeply impressed her.

Back when she was in elementary school, she was impressed by Maïmouna Kane, the first woman Minister on the Condition of Women, who took a journey through Senegal. This made her realize that it was necessary for her to do something for women in her country.
She has now been Secretary General of the National Order of Experts of Senegal for the past six years.

Which certainly reveals her temperament: “The first way to impose oneself is to have competence and rigor,” she says in a soft voice.
Her legal profession made her even more aware of the condition of Senegalese women, which urged her to join the struggle for greater social equity.
In her commitment, she is involved at the forefront of many associatiations; she has been the President of the Association of Women Lawyers of Senegal (AJS) for seven years. Currently, she is a member of Cheikh Anta Diop Foundation whose mission is to support the University of Dakar for the promotion of excellence. She is a member of the National Observatory for Parity and an administrative Board member of the Agency for the Development of Social Marketing (ADEMAS), which is mainly concerned with family well-being through maternal and child health.
As a professional, she is used to combining her work with this full associative life. She acquired her culture of citizenship at school; volunteering was part of her extracurricular activities, and by joining one of the first women’s organizations, the Zonta Club. “I dedicate myself to volunteer work as needed. I only agreed to take on certain responsibilities when my children grew up”.
Her first vocation is to work on the legal texts within the AJS in order to make society evolve and improve the legal status of women and children.

“For example, I played an active role in bringing about tax fairness, because until 2008, Senegalese women, as taxpayers, were not considered as heads of families. As a result, Senegalese women had a number of shares equivalent to that of a single man to pay. This has been the subject of a long demand by both trade unionists and other women like us.»
Marie Delphine Ndiaye remembers fervently the texts she worked on within this association: texts that discriminated against women, texts related to abortion, criminalization of rape and women’s access to land. She traveled a lot in Senegal on this last issue, with the AJS. This advocacy is ongoing, to ensure that women have access to this right guaranteed by the constitution yet not applied to them, often due to women’s lack of knowledge. However, rural women are becoming more and more informed through awareness campaigns. “The women’s movement has much expanded and diversified in terms of social categories. When we have a critical mass, the situation will change».
For her, transmission to young people is very important, so that they commit themselves as the stakes become higher and higher. “First is the empowerment of women that will liberate them psychologically and socially”. She is very optimistic in view of the distance traveled so far, because through laws, we are able to stabilize social gains.” A law is only the expression of the will of the people at a given moment and a change in society takes time.”