I’m sorry that these plans are only available in French, but I hope they will be helpful to you. You’ll need Adobe Reader to read the pdf files.

Source: IMF

Mali: Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper

Mali: Joint Staff Advisory Note of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper

Posted on March 4, 2008.Source:European Journal of Nutrition via Nature.com

Food variety - a good indicator of nutritional adequacy of the diet? A case study from an urban area in Mali, West Africa

A Hatløy, L E Torheim and A Oshaug

Institute for Nutrition Research, University of Oslo, Box 1046 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway

Correspondence to: A Hatløy, Institute for Nutrition Research, University of Oslo, Box 1046 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway.

Abstract

Objective: This study assesses whether a simple count of food items and food groups can predict the nutritional adequacy of the diet in an economically poor country.Design: A three-day weighed record of children.Setting: Koutiala town, in Southeastern Mali.Subjects: Seventy-seven children, 13-58 months of age. One child was excluded owing to an extraordinarily low food variety. Intervention: The study was conducted in April-August 1995. Data from this study were used to create two different indices: Food Variety Score (FVS), a simple count of food items, and Dietary Diversity Score (DDS), a count of food groups. Mean Adequacy Ratio (MAR) was calculated as an indicator for nutrient adequacy, and used to validate FVS and DDS. Results: Mean (s.d.) FVS was 20.5 (3. and mean (s.d.) DDS was 5.8 (1.1). A positive correlation was found both between FVS and MAR (Pearson 0.33, P<0.001) and DDS and MAR (Pearson 0.39, P<0.001). With cut-off points for FVS at 23 and for DDS at 6, the indices have high ability to identify those with a nutritionally inadequate diet. MAR increased with increasing FVS and DDS. FVS needs to be at least 15 or DDS at least 5 to give a satisfactory MAR. Conclusion: Although a simple count of food items or food groups cannot give a full picture of the adequacy of the nutrient intake, the results from this study show that the food scores can give a fairly good assessment of the nutritional adequacy of the diet, particularly if combined. Such indicators are important for identification of vulnerable groups in areas where people normally eat from a shared bowl, which makes detailed dietary intake studies difficult, time consuming and expensive. Sponsorship: The Norwegian Universities’ Committee for Development Research (NUFU), the Norwegian Research Council and the Nordic Africa Institute funded the project.

Keywords

Africa; dietary assessment methods; dietary diversity; food variety; Mali; mean adequacy ratio

Received 3 May 1998; revised 2 July 1998; accepted 21 July 1998

December 1998, Volume 52, Number 12, Pages 891-898

Table of contents Previous Abstract Next Article PDF

The Human Development Report 2007/2008 offers a long summary of development in Mali. Go to http://hdrstats.undp.org/countries/data_sheets/cty_ds_MLI.html to link directly to the data sheets and here to download the complete world report.

Here is just the first section of the Mali data sheets.

2007/2008 Report

Mali

HDI Rank - 173

01. Human development index
Human development index value, 2005	0.380
Life expectancy at birth, annual estimates (years), 2005	53.1
Adult literacy rate (% aged 15 and older), 1995-2005	24.0
Combined gross enrolment ratio for primary, secondary and tertiary education (%), 2005	36.7
GDP per capita (PPP US$), 2005	1,033
Life expectancy index	0.469
Education index	0.282
GDP index	0.390
GDP per capita (PPP US$) rank minus HDI rank	- 8
1a. Basic indicators for other UN member states
Life expectancy at birth, annual estimates (years), 2000-05	53.1
Adult literacy rate (% aged 15 and older), 1995-2005	24.0
Combined gross enrolment ratio for primary, secondary and tertiary education (%), 2005	36.7
GDP per capita (PPP US$), 2005	1,033
Population, total (thousands), 2004	11,611
Fertility rate, total (births per woman), 2000-05	6.7
Under-five mortality rate (per 1,000 live births), 2005	218
Net primary enrolment rate (%), 2004	51
HIV prevalence (% aged 15-49), 2005	1.7 [1.3–2.1]
Population undernourished (% of total population), 2002/04	29
Population using an improved water source (%), 2004	50

Posted by sociolingo on January 5, 2008

Source: https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/862/1/Sears_Jonathan_M_200709_PhD.pdf

DEEPENING DEMOCRACY AND CULTURAL CONTEXT
IN THE REPUBLIC OF MALI, 1992-2002
by
JONATHAN MICHAEL SEARS

This thesis challenges the view that the Republic of Mali is a model of democratization in
Africa with the aim of opening the conceptual framework of democratic citizenship inherent in
the democratization discourse to greater critical scrutiny. The ‘enthusiastic’ view is held and set forth by various segments of the unity-seeking ruling class (local and foreign, State and NGO) of bringing to Mali a Western-oriented, procedurally minimal democracy, and citizen identity commensurate with international financial institutions’ and donor countries’ vision of
democratization as political and economic liberalization. Consequently, this hegemonic project co-opts selected indigenous and Islamic idioms of political and social identity, to reinvent democratization as ‘moral governance.’ Cosmopolitan upper and upper-middle class actors thus apologize for highly personalized politics at the national and local levels, and articulate these more broadly with idioms of recovering rectitude and social cohesion that preserve and reproduce hierarchical social norms.

In Malian political culture and in the scholarship of Malian political change, the hegemonic project of citizen identity formation becomes more evident as a construction, as discourses, norms, and practices produced and reproduced by privileged actors. Moreover, the contested character of these constructions becomes evident only as we address the development and deployment of selectively synthesized indigenous, Islamic, and Western-democratic norms, practices, and institutions of citizenship in contemporary Mali. Without a more embedded sense of political membership and identity, the merely procedural democratic project remains vulnerable to challenges from multiple, alternative sites of moral, social, and political authority.

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Source: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/anth honors/2

”You Eat Beans!”: Kin-based Joking
Relationships, Obligations, and Identity
in Urban Mali
Rachel A. Jones

ABSTRACT
For people in urban environments, practices and beliefs allowing creation of supportive
social relationships are important for dealing with economic and other insecurities. This
paper examines roles of rhm`mjtw`, a kin-based joking relationship, in Bamako, Mali. I
argue that people in Bamako use and negotiate practices and beliefs associated with
rhm`mjtw` for practical purposes. Participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and
historical research were used to examine ways that Malians use this joking relationship to
promote social cohesion, circumvent the power of the state, provide opportunities for
economic gain, and preserve cultural histories and identities in a rapidly changing urban
environment.

This paper is posted at DigitalCommons@Macalester College.
http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/anth honors/2

c Copyright is owned by author of this document.

The following article was found on ELDIS

http://www.eldis.org/cf/search/disp/docdisplay.cfm?doc=DOC15396&resource=f1

The following report was found on ELDIS

 http://www.eldis.org/cf/search/disp/docdisplay.cfm?doc=DOC23083&resource=f1

Democratization in Mali: putting history to work

How have local cultures contributed to democracy in Mali?

Pringle, R. / United States Institute of Peace (USIP) , 2006

This report outlines the driving forces behind Mali’s democratisation by taking a historical perspective. The paper argues that the foundation of Mali’s democracy is built on inter ethnic tolerance, highlighting how Islam can play a constructive role in this process. It also highlights the value of local experience and tradition in helping to achieve a sense of political ownership and self-confidence. The paper presents a summary of those aspects of Mali’s geography, history, and culture that are most relevant to its democratisation. It also provides a description of the reasons Malians cite for the success to date of their democracy as well as its weaknesses as seen both by Malian and foreign observers. It also outlines of a number of important indicators of Malian democracy, including the status of women, the new role of the military, and the impact of democratisation on the Niger Authority (Office du Niger). The paper highlights that: while radical Islam may have inhibited the creation of democratic institutions in other parts of the Muslim world, Malians do not widely perceive such radicalism as a threat to their democracy. Indeed, radical Islam seems to be growing slowly, if at all, in Mali Malians see the long-standing problem of unrest in the desert north not as a democratisation problem but rather as a security problem and threat to national unity most of the country’s citizens would agree that strife in Ivory Coast is an even greater threat to the viability of their new democracy than the northern unrest FULL TEXT Read full text

The following report was found on ELDIS

The growth and impact of community schools in Mali

DeStefano, J. / Academy for Educational Development (AED), USA , 2006

This case study examines the overall growth and impact of community schools in Mali during the last decade. It focuses on the Sikasso region, where Save the Children and 16 local NGOs, using USAID funds, have supported almost 800 schools—roughly 90 percent of the community schools in that region. In Mali, community schools are education centres spontaneously started by the community members themselves, almost independent of government participation. The term also encompasses schools supported by international NGOs, usually with substantial external funding and local NGO participation. Some key findings include: community schools in Mali have evolved from operating outside the official education system to being recognised components of that system community schools demonstrated that basic education could be delivered in locally constructed buildings with locally recruited, less qualified teachers and using native local languages under the management and control of the communities themselves. Some concerns raised by the case study include: the communities previously supported through external funding must now rely entirely on the funds they generate locally to continue to operate their schools at no point during its experience in Sikasso did Save the Children address the issue of government funding for community schools. During the course of 10 years’ experience, there was no experimentation with new ways for the Ministry of Education to allocate funds to community schools without subverting the local government authority, which lies at the heart of this model available data shows that community schools achieve quality roughly equal to what is obtained in public schools. Evidence suggests that community schools are able to obtain comparable or superior results using teachers with much less education and relying on local management and control, both of which are significant. However, the low level of achievement is clearly still not satisfactory. The report concludes that the challenge, therefore, becomes greater than just how to assure financial flows so that community schools can continue to operate. Rather, the focus must fall squarely on community school support and improvement so that they can not just produce results comparable to government schools, but provide children in Mali with a solid foundation for future development and learning. FULL TEXT Read full text

For those interested in the Dogon peoples of Mali this report by Roger Blench may be of interest:

A survey of Dogon languages in Mali: overview - Roger Blench
Mallam Dendo Ltd., Cambridge, UK

The languages spoken on the Dogon Plateau and adjacent areas in northern Mali are generally known to outsiders as ‘Dogon’, but this term is not used by individual groups. For a long time, research on the Dogon was dominated by the work of Marcel Griaule and his successors, which focused on a very specific group, the Dogon of Sangha. Bertho published short comparative wordlists of some Dogon lects but these made little impression. Calame-Griaule (1956) published a dialect map of Dogon, the relationship between the named communities and the Tr-S represented in her dictionary (Calame-Griaule 196 remained unclear in the absence of data. Until recently, Dogon was treated in reference books as if it were a single language (e.g. Bendor-Samuel et al. 1989), but Hochstetler et al. (2004) estimated there are no less than 17 languages under the Dogon rubric and that the family is highly internally divided.

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Source:http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~anth/arch/niger/broch-eng.html

Susan Keech McIntosh and Roderick J. McIntosh

Roderick and Susan McIntosh excavated at Jenne-jeno and neighboring sites in 1977 and 1981 and returned in 1994 for coring and more survey, with funding from the National Science Foundation of the United States, the American Association of University Women, and the National Geographic Society (1994). This research formed the basis of their Ph.D. dissertations at Cambridge University and the University of California at Santa Barbara, respectively. The McIntoshes have published two monographs and numerous articles on their archaeological research in the Middle Niger. They are professors of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and they continue to collaborate with Malian colleagues from the Institut des Sciences Humaines on research along the Middle Niger.

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For centuries, the upper Inland Niger Delta of the Middle Niger between modern Mopti and Segou has been a vital crossroads for trade. Historical sources, such as the 1828 account of the French explorer Rene Caillié, as well as local Tarikhs (histories written in Arabic) detail for us the central role that Jenne played in the commercial activities of the Western Sudan during the last 500 years. The seventeenth century author of the Tarikh es-Sudan, al-Sadi, wrote that “it is because of this blessed town that camel caravans come to Timbuktu from all points of the horizon”. In the famous “Golden Trade of the Moors”, gold from mines far to the south was transported overland to Jenne, then trans-shipped on broad-bottom canoes (pirogues) to Timbuktu, and thence by camel to markets in North Africa and Europe. Leo Africanus reported in 1512 that the extensive boat trade on the Middle Niger involved massive amounts of cereals and dried fish shipped from Jenne to provision arid Timbuktu. Today, the stunning mud architecture of Jenne in distinctive Sudanic style is a legacy of its early trade ties with North Africa. Three kilometers to the southeast, the large mound called Jenne-jeno (ancient Jenne) or Djoboro is claimed by oral traditions as the original settlement of Jenne. Barren and carpeted by a thick layer of broken pottery, Jenne-jeno lay mute for decades, its history and significance totally unknown. Scientific excavations in the 1970’s and 1980’s revealed that the mound is composed of over five meters of debris accumulated during sixteen centuries of occupation that began c. 200 B.C.E. These excavations, in addition to more than doubling the period of known history for this region, provided some surprises regarding the local development of society. The results indicated that earlier assumptions about the emergence of complex social organization in urban settlements and the development of long-distance trade as innovations appearing only after the arrival of the Arabs in North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries were incorrect. The archaeology of Jenne- jeno and the surrounding area clearly showed an early, indigenous growth of trade and social complexity. The importance of this discovery has resulted in the entry of Jenne- jeno, along with Jenne, on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites.

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Source: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~anth/arch/niger/ceramics.html

Summary Description of the Pottery of the Jenne-jeno, Hambarketolo, and Kaniana Assemblages Copied and adapted from Mcintosh, Susan, ed. (1995). Excavations at Jenne-Jeno, Hambarketolo, and Kaniana (Inland Niger Delta, Mali), the 1981 Season. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Phase I/II (c. 250 B.C. - A.D. 350). The pottery assemblage in the earliest levels consists primarily of simple rims from ovoid-shaped open bowls, restricted globular jars, and domed potlids. Together, these constitute 70-100% of the rim sherds in early occupation levels. Rims from more complex forms (everted rims, carinated forms) are rare. Many of the Phase I/II vessels must have had rounded bottoms as the ratio of base to rim sherds is 12.5/100. Ring bases predominate, but flat and pedestal bases are also found. Several fragments of cylindrical potlegs were also recovered. Rim diameters are generally small, and there are remarkably few sherds with demonstrable signs of use as cooking pots.
In general, Phase I/II pottery was very well made. Paste was predominantly medium textured, with grog tempering. Occurring in variable frequencies was a distinctive category of thin-walled, finely prepared pottery that produced the high-pitched clinking of fine china when two sherds were knocked together. Its fine fabric is responsible for its high-pitched sound and refined appearance: the paste includes clay, variable amounts of quartz sand, and a small quantity of finely ground grog. Sherds with medium-texture paste have larger amounts of coarser grog. This fineware was produced only in Phase I/II. The care with which it was produced is evident not only in the fineness of the paste and thin walls but also in the exceptionally smooth and even surface finish. From the fine surface lines, it is clear that a tournette was used to turn the pot slowly during manufacture, just as it is by Jenne potters today. The careful smoothing was probably done with a piece of leather. One fineware rim and several others in the Phase I/II study collection had the characteristic dimpled surface created by the hammer-and-anvil technique which would have thinned the walls, removed irregularities, and smoothed the surface of the piece.
The dominant decorative mode in Phase I/II is twine impression. Over 75% of the body sherds are decorated with twine alone (plain sherds = <5% of the body sherds; slipped = 10-15%). Impression with a plaited strip roulette accounts for 70% of the twine-decorated body sherds. Rim sherds have smaller relative frequency of plaited strip roulette and larger frequencies of twisted twine rouletting due to the popular practice in Phase I/II of placing a zone of twisted twine roulette impression near the rim, directly above the plaited strip roulette impression covering the greater part of the pot surface. In addition to these two roulette types on the same pot, other decorative modes unique to Phase I/II include rockering, fine horizontal incision superimposed on other roulette types, cord-wrapped stick roulette, and red paint applied in cross-hatching on an unslipped zone below the lip of simple open bowls. Black and white paint and channeling (multiple grooves) are virtually non-existent in the early part of this phase. They appear at the end of the phase, foreshadowing the explosion in popularity of paint-and-channeled pottery in the succeeding phase. With the exception of single grooves and incision (on twine), other plastic motifs are largely absent throughout Phase I/II, although two examples of raised applique were recovered, both on singular objects that may not have been used in a domestic context.

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Source: Global Development Network

Claiming our rights: surviving pregnancy and childbirth in Mali Discrimination and lack of access to health care lead to large numbers of maternal deaths in Mali

by Center for Reproductive Rights Produced by: Center for Reproductive Rights, formerly known as the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP), New York , 2003

This paper demonstrates that due to the number of deaths attributable to pregnancy and childbirth in Mali, the right to life has yet to be realised for women. Contributing to these deaths are everyday denials of the rights to health care, non-discrimination and reproductive self-determination. The paper argues that the government of Mali has not turned a blind eye to the challenge of guaranteeing survival of pregnancy and childbirth. Policies and government institutions recognise the need to improve women’s status and increase access to health care. The policies adopted by the government of Mali reflect a rights-based approach to women’s empowerment and health, particularly their reproductive health. While this approach could be even more forcefully articulated in binding legal instruments, the current policy framework provides a strong basis for government accountability for ensuring women’s right to survive pregnancy and childbirth. What is needed now is concerted action to make legal and policy guarantees a reality for the women of Mali. Recommendations: The government of Mali: Ministry of Health: invest in maternal health and emergency obstetric care allocate additional funding address material shortages at clinics establish emergency referral and transportation plans expand family planning services address unsafe abortion counter the impact of health sector reform measures help identify needed health system improvements track incidences of maternal mortality make health centers women-friendly strengthen medical training programs strengthen health-care standards Ministry of Justice: investigate malpractice law reform addressing reproductive health promote the use of law to address the underlying causes of maternal death Ministry for the Advancement of Women, Children, and the Family: empower women to claim their reproductive rights champion a concerted approach among government ministries To the United Nations, World Bank and other UN Agencies: strengthen international norms evaluate the impact of recommended health sector reforms To the international donor community: earmark resources to address maternal mortality and its underlying causes in Mali target structural barriers to health care access facilitate provider training and education promote public education and information sharing on health address discrimination against women support the advocacy efforts of national NGOs take a coordinated approach To African Regional bodies: In all regional development and human rights platforms, emphasise maternal survival as a key human-rights and development priority for Africa. Apply diplomatic pressure to member states to address seriously the direct and underlying causes of maternal mortality. Summary originally provided by Eldis, a GDNet content partner.

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