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In 2006, the boat Mr. Diouf boarded with his friends was one of the first of many pirogues, as the craft are known, that departed that year from the coastal villages of Senegal in the direction of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago 60 miles off the Moroccan coast.

Worried about health risks posed by the corpses, Mr. Diouf had to throw the bodies overboard.

With their traditional way of fishing no match for the industrial trawlers from China, Europe and Russia that had begun combing the sea around them, Mr. Diouf and his fellow villagers could no longer support their families.

It was in that macabre moment 17 years ago, Mr. Diouf said, that he vowed to do everything in his power to stop others from making the choice he had and enduring the same fate: He would make it his mission to dissuade his fellow Senegalese from trying to reach Europe and drowning or dying in myriad other ways on the perilous journey.

“If we don’t do anything, we become accomplices in their deaths,” said Mr. Diouf, 54, sitting in a dusty office of the nonprofit he co-founded, empty but for one desk and a couple of chairs.