Sociolingo’s Mali

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: IRIN NEWS

MALI: Teacher strikes may mean ‘blank’ school year

BAMAKO, 10 June 2008 (IRIN) - In Mali the most important exams come last: the baccalaureate at the end of June. But this year, with secondary-school teachers in their seventh straight month of strikes, the exam risks going unmarked, meaning students may face a blank school year. That is making many of them angry.

Secondary school teachers have refused to invigilate or mark any secondary school exams. While the government sent in emergency invigilators from the national teaching academy to monitor the exams which began in late May, these invigilators are not qualified to mark them.

“It is time for the arm-wrestling between the government and teachers to stop. Our future of is at stake,” said Mohamed Ibrahim Baby, secretary-general of the Association of Malian students (EMEA). “How can we study throughout the school year yet not have our exams marked?”

The baccalaureate is the minimum qualification for many professional posts in Mali, including the teaching profession, and under a quarter of Malian students reach the position to take it.

Teacher demands

Teachers are asking the government to give them a US$142 housing allowance, calling for contract teachers’ salaries to be increased and for salaries to go up year on year as teachers remain in the system. Currently, while pay increases annually at the same rates as all state-sector workers - they went up by five percent in January 2008 - the pay-grades do not. Meanwhile qualified teachers who are not state-certified receive lower salaries than government-qualified teachers and are unable to participate in teacher training.

“None of our demands have yet been met,” complained Youssouf Berthe, secretary-general of the country’s group of teachers’ unions, COSES. “The government has paid university professors US$142 each to help them with housing - why can’t we get the same? This isn’t a luxury we’re demanding, it’s simply so we can live in decent conditions.”

And the fight does not look set to end. “We have decided to go all the way this time - we will not stop until our demands are met. They must be resolved once and for all this year,” Amadou Lougué a teacher at Kati Secondary school, 20km from Bamako told IRIN.

Protests have worked in the past. In 2007 teachers unions protested for the government to meet back-payments for overtime worked, and the government relented in February 2008.

In a press conference on 8 June President Amadou Toumani Touré announced the government was seeking solutions to end the crisis, but that when it came to the housing allowance the government would not give in.

The reason he gave was simple: “The state cannot afford to pay such an allowance,” he told reporters.

“We have made enormous efforts to improve the lot of teachers. If we also give housing allowances today, tomorrow they will ask for more, and after that health-workers and other state officials will ask for the same thing,” President Touré continued.

The education ministry has set up a special Parliamentary commission to meet with teachers’ unions, parents and students associations to try to resolve the crisis.

Some school-heads welcome the move. “We will take all necessary steps because we must save the school year. A blank school year doesn’t suit the students or their parents and will not serve the country,” said Daouda Simbara, head of a secondary school.

In the meantime, parents and students are calling for the stand-off to end. The EMEA has appealed for “good sense to prevail” from all involved, while Mamadou Traoré, member of a Bamako-wide parent-teachers association told IRIN, “Teachers must know that every fight has an end. The government has already satisfied some of their demands. They must now think about the lives of students who have not yet completed the school year.”

He added, “You cannot get everything you want at the same time.”

Source: IRIN NEWS

MALI: Still a long way to go to meet adult literacy targets
BAMAKO, 17 April 2008 (IRIN) - In 2000 the Malian government signed up to UN Education for All goals to help 50 percent more adults become literate by 2015, but eight years on still only 30 percent of Malian adults can read or write, and the government is yet to outline its strategy to address the problem.

“We have very low literacy rates in all languages here in Mali, and we know we need to make much faster progress,” Oumar Cissé, communications adviser at the Mali Ministry for Women and Children, told IRIN.

According to Idrissa Diarra, education specialist at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Bamako, literate adults have higher earning power, are more likely to escape poverty, and to take the education of their children seriously.

“If women are illiterate, how can they play a strong role in their communities, how can they take strong household decisions, and how can they vote?” he asked.

Mali is just one of six countries (alongside Niger, Chad, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Afghanistan) in which under 40 percent of adults are literate, according to UNICEF.

Government policy

In April 2004 the government launched the Decade of Literacy in Missabougou, a district of Bamako. Recognising slow progress in increasing literacy rates, it went on to divide its Education Ministry in two in October 2007, creating a ministry of basic education and literacy in national languages, and another to address secondary, superior education and professional training.

“Creating a ministry solely responsible for literacy shows the commitment we have to improving rates,” Souleymane Kone, national director of the Basic Education, Literacy and Languages Ministry, told IRIN.

However, he said the government had still not recruited all of its staff-members, let alone developed a national literacy strategy, adding that he hoped it would be published in a few months.

The president has promised to allocate 3 percent of the national education budget to adult literacy training as part of the strategy.

Education currently receives 35 percent of the overall government budget.

But Oumar Traouré coordinator of the non-governmental organisation Support for Quality Education (OMAES), which provides literacy training to adults through schools in Seygou, 130km north of Bamako, told IRIN this amount will not be enough to significantly boost the figures. “Three percent of 35 percent is nothing,” he told IRIN.

He continued: “But it is better than nothing… at the moment we have no electricity or teaching materials in our training centres, and we can’t even afford to pay our teachers, so they end up leaving.”

Few teachers

The lack of literate adults to teach literacy programmes is hampering success, according to Traouré. Many adult literacy programmes in Malian schools are governed by school management committees but in the schools where OMAES works, most of the management committee members are themselves illiterate.

In particular, the lack of qualified female literacy trainers poses problems, according to UNICEF’s Diarra, because many men are reluctant to send female family members to learn under male teachers, so women are often forced to drop out of programmes.

With this in mind the government is working closely with organisations such as UNICEF and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to train female teachers, many of them school-leavers.

“They don’t need an advanced formal qualification - after all, they are only teaching basic language and numeracy, not how to read the stars,” said Diarra.

With the halfway mark for the Education for All target behind them, Cissé hopes the time-pressure will spark results. “We should start to see major changes this year,” she said.

Despite the enormous efforts that lie ahead, even Traoré believes Mali has some hope of meeting its 2015 targets. “We may get there”, he told IRIN, “but only with lots of difficulty.”

aj/cb

© IRIN. All rights reserved. More humanitarian news and analysis: http://www.irinnews.org

Watch this video about a school in southern Mali

African Sky Presents a video short that takes you to visit a rural primary school in Mali. Produced by Scott M. Lacy. All rights reserved, 2007

Source: APA

Mali pledges to consolidate teaching of Arabic

Source: http://www.dreamscape.com/deborah/laubach/WIL/Global/oumou.htm

Oumou Samake, Mali

Profile of a Woman in Literacy

Day after day of her life, Oumou Samake labored as a farmer in the arid soil of Mali, her homeland in western Africa. Like her mother and grandmother before her, Oumou was illiterate and extremely poor. She struggled from dawn to dusk to grow crops that would survive in the parched earth. Stories of a famine in the 1970s that killed hundreds of thousands of Malians haunted her. Fatal diseases like malaria were a constant threat. During the dry season, Oumou and her family often went hungry.

Oumou Samake foresaw no changes for herself or her children. Mali is one of the world’s least-developed countries. Like its neighbors Mauritania and Senegal, it is almost entirely desert and sub-desert. Only two percent of the land is arable. Paper has to be imported into this landlocked nation, which has a literacy rate of 25 percent. Poverty and diseases account for an infant mortality rate ten times that of the United States.

But change does happen, even for a peasant woman in one of the poorest nations on earth. Education was the means by which Oumou Samake began to change her life, and set her and her children on a steady course out of utter destitution.

Read the rest of the story 

 

Posted by sociolingo on January 5, 2008

I’ve received the following conference notification, closing date end of December. If you are interested in sending in a paper and/or attending the conference, please read to the end of the article and respond to the conference organisers NOT to Sociolingo.

Call for papers for the 7^th Conference on Mande Studies,

Lisbon, Portugal, June 24-28, 2008

Panel: Literacy practices in the Mande area/ Pratiques de l’écrit dans l’aire mandé

Convenors / Organisatrices:

Anne Doquet, IRD & Centre d’études africaines (EHESS)

Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, Centre d’études africaines (EHESS)

Abstract

This panel calls for propositions dealing with literacy practices: accounts of practices observed in the field as well as reflections on the researcher’s writing practices.

Literacy practices on grass-root level are often overlooked, but they are a growing part of people’s lives: notebooks or sheets of papers are held in a variety of settings, for a wide range of purposes.

Literate skills often remain a scarce resource, which gives them a specific role in the present context of political changes at local level. Studies of schooling choices show that people still believe in the importance of literacy even outside formal schooling. This raises issues of languages and scripts (sometimes contesting the dominant status of official languages as written languages).

Writing and reading practices invest the domestic sphere as well as the community level: keeping records, writing down knowledge, preserving secrets, etc. How do this processes interfere with oral modes of keeping and passing down knowledge?

Along with these private practices, studies of bureaucratic literacies (and their private counterpart), local historical writing, as well as other uses of print and press would usefully complement this approach. The panel will also include papers dealing with the way the writing activities of the researcher are locally perceived.

Literacy studies are a field of inquiry which is currently renewed by works from other African settings (see for instance the book edited by Karin Barber Africa’s hidden histories. Everyday literacy and Making the Self, Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press 2006). We believe that Mande studies could benefit from this developments and provide new insights on this theme.

Résumé

L’objet de ce panel est de réunir des contributions portant sur des pratiques de l’écrit, que ce soit des pratiques observées sur le terrain ou un retour sur la pratique du chercheur comme ethnographe.

Les pratiques d’écriture des acteurs locaux, souvent inaperçues, sont pourtant largement présentes : cahiers, feuilles volantes font désormais partie du quotidien des zones rurales ou urbaines. La rareté des compétences en fait une ressource recherchée, rendant particulièrement vifs les enjeux de pouvoir autour de l’écrit accompagnant les reformulations politiques contemporaines. Les stratégies éducatives montrent un intérêt persistant pour l’écriture mais pas toujours dans la langue du système éducatif formel. Aussi les questions de langues et de graphies (contestant parfois le statut privilégié des langues officielles à l’écrit) sont-elles centrales pour comprendre la manière dont les individus se rapportent à l’écrit.

Ces pratiques ont pour échelle la sphère domestique ou la communauté et prennent diverses formes : tenir ses comptes, conserver des savoirs, préserver des secrets, etc. Une question se pose alors : comment cela s’articule-t-il avec les modes oraux de conservation et de transmission des savoirs ?

Outre ces pratiques privées, des analyses des écrits bureaucratiques (de leurs usages ou des résistances qu’ils suscitent), de la mise par écrit de l’histoire locale, des usages de l’imprimé et de la presse pourraient compléter cette approche. En parallèle, d’autres contributions prendront pour point de départ l’activité d’écriture du chercheur et les réactions qu’elle suscite.

Réfléchir à ces différentes formes de la culture écrite nous semble important au moment où l’histoire de ces pratiques se constitue en champ de recherche pour d’autres régions du continent (en témoigne l’ouvrage collectif dirigé par Karin Barber Africa’s hidden histories. Everyday literacy and Making the Self, Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press 2006).

Contributors to this date (preliminary titles)/ Intervenants à ce jour (titres provisoires) :

Anne Doquet, IRD & Centre d’études africaines (EHESS)

The anthropologist’s writings: issues around form and content / Les écrits de l’anthropologue : enjeux autour de la forme et du contenu

Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, Centre d’études africaines (EHESS) & GRS (Univ. Lyon 2)

Writing and the self: an ethnographic approach of personal notebooks held by villagers around Fana (Mali) / Qu’est-ce qu’écrire pour soi ? Approche ethnographique de cahiers personnels recueillis près de Fana (Mali)

Francesco Zappa, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

Islamic printing: a new frontier of written Bambara ? / L’imprimé islamique : nouvelle frontière du bambara écrit ?

If you are interested, please send an abstract and a working title to Anne Doquet (a.mbodjpouye@free.fr) by February 1, 2008.

Please note that West African colleagues residing in West Africa who wish to compete for funding to attend the conference must submit their papers to Kassim Koné (kone@cortland.edu) by December 31, 2007.

Si vous êtes intéressés, veuillez adresser un résumé et une proposition de titre à Anne Doquet (a.mbodjpouye@free.fr) avant le 1/02/2008.

Les chercheurs basés en Afrique de l’Ouest désireux de solliciter le financement de leur venue doivent soumettre leur texte à Kassim Koné (kone@cortland.edu) avant le 31/12/2007.

The following article from Christian Aid shows the difference that lighting and a good water supply can make to young lives. Solar power is a viable option in a country where sunlight is guaranteed and best of all - free. From the comfort of Europe it is difficult to imagine schools without electric light. But every primary school so far that I have visited in Mali does not have electricity.

Shedding light in the classroom

The pupils’ faces were keen and attentive in the slightly eerie light. Their impeccable, some would say old-fashioned, behaviour would be a revelation to teachers in most of Britain’s schools. And this was for an extra lesson, long after the final bell of the day had been rung.

The young students of Tabakoro school in Mali were taking full advantage of the lights which now illuminate two of their classrooms and allow them extra time to learn. On other days their mothers attend adult literacy classes in the local language there. In the run-up to exams in May, the rooms are packed.

• Support our appeal today

But the village, in the rural south of the country, is miles from any power grid. The light comes from electricity generated by a solar panel on the roof of the school building. It is part of an integrated programme of renewable energy systems installed in the village by the Mali Folke Centre (MFC), a Christian Aid partner.

‘Before the installation at the school, many of the children had no light at home by which to do their homework. Some families cannot even afford paraffin for their lanterns,’ says Nango Bagajoks, the head of the junior school who is giving the late lesson. ‘Now they can come and work here. It is much better for them.’

There are now solar schemes run in 30 villages by MFC. In all cases it trains local people to maintain them, to ensure a continuing supply of virtually free energy for health centres and public spaces as well as for schools. A properly maintained system should last for 25 years.

Mali is on the front line of climate change, a country whose land goes from the Sahara desert in the north to relatively lush savannah in the south. In between is the dry area of sahel, where droughts are predicted to double in coming decades.

In this area, MFC develops plantations of jatropha, a plant that thrives in harsh conditions and which helps to stabilise areas close to desertification. It also produces seeds which are made into a bio-fuel substitute for diesel oil.

The centrepiece of the Tabakoro scheme is the solar-powered water system, where pumps supply a water tower that creates pressure for four taps. This replaces the single hand pump, which before had to supply the village’s 2,000 people.

It might not sound like a huge improvement, but it drastically cuts down the time and effort that women have to spend fetching water and it guarantees clean drinking water – with a subsequent decline in water-borne diseases.

The days of pounding maize or millet to flour in a giant pestle and mortar are also over for many women. The village now boasts a small milling machine – powered by jatropha bio-fuel – to take away the strenuous and time-consuming work for the cost of a few pence.

The nearby village of Zanbala also has a solar-powered water system and lights in the health centre and school. The school recently recorded a 100 per cent pass rate for its 11 year-olds taking their exams to graduate from primary school. This was due to pupils being able to study in the evenings, according to Mamadou F Doumbia, the head master.

He says: ‘I am very proud. Other schools did not achieve this.’

The following article was seen on the International Education Systems’ website

 http://ies.edc.org/wherewework/project.php?id=3456&country=398

Mali Teacher Training via Radio

In response to the in-service training needs of Mali’s primary education teachers, IES is assisting the Malian Ministry of Education in the use of interactive radio programming for teachers and their supervisors. The Teacher Training via Radio activity takes advantage of radio’s considerable reach throughout Mali and aims to strengthen the capacity of the Ministry at central and decentralized levels to create quality teacher training focused on student-centered and gender-sensitive pedagogy. In consultation and coordination with Ministry and other education partners, this programming endeavors to respond to the needs of a diverse teacher corps, consisting of both community teachers and state-educated professionals. A second component of the project is to establish four virtual teacher training centers within Malian teacher training institutes to build the capacity of professors in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) for teacher training.

Duration: 2004 to 2007

Funders:
Academy for Educational Development
U.S. Agency for International Development

For more info, contact:

• Abdechafi Boubkir, aboubkir@edc.org
• Rebecca Rhodes, rrhodes@edc.org

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

Last week I heard from someone who had been at the non-formal education UNESCO regional meeting here in Bamako. A number of agencies did presentations of the methodologies they were using here in Mali. One of those was the Reflect methodology. I looked around for something on it and found the Jeunesse et développement site describing their work in Mali.

Manankoro development programme

The project area around Manankoro takes in the rural communes of Sibirila and Yinidougou. It covers an area of 5 790 square kilometres with a population of around 40.000. The population is relatively young and is principally concerned with agriculture and hunting.

Situated in the extreme south and bordering on the Ivory Coast, Manankoro is often considered as the Eldorado of Mali, with its rich and varied fauna. Perhaps due to this reputation it has tended to be left behind in most of the main development initiatives since 1968.

Today there are many challenges among which are:

Isolation : Many roads are in poor condition and are completely impassable during the rainy season. During this time the area can find itself cut off from the rest of the country. Access is easier towards the Ivory Coast with a tarmac road running from Manankoro to Odienné. 90 % of the population know this country better than the interior of Mali and many young men regularly head south in search of employment and opportunity, although this has decreased due to the current civil unrest in the Ivory Coast.

Health : The community health situation is cause for concern because of the lack of health centres and also because of the state of the roads. The most common illnesses are malaria, severe respiratory infections and sexually transmitted infections. Complications linked to pregnancies too close together occur frequently. Two out of three women advised by J&D health workers suffer from a collapsed uterus. These women often say nothing about their condition because they consider it part of the normal cycle of reproduction.

Manankoro has only one health centre which is staffed by a nurse and two assistants, a pharmacist and a mid-wife. The closest village is 15 km from the centre and the most distant 80 km. In line with the government’s health policy, Community Health Associations are being established to improve health conditions. Each association is responsible for creating a health centre to serve its area. The project area includes two such health centres, one serving the villages around Bamba and another those around Mafele.

The Community health Associations are relatively new and suffer from poor organisation, lack of financial resources and trained personnel. These constraints are virtually inevitable for inexperienced organisations in their formative phase.

Women over burdened with responsibilities : In Manankoro women are house keepers and mothers responsible for all aspects of the well being of their children. The men provide the cereal that is the staple diet. Women process the corn, the basic staple, pounding it several times to reduce it to flour. They must also provide a reserve to meet daily family expenses so during the 6 months of the rainy season most women cultivate rice meet this need. In the dry season women collect firewood for the whole year as well as ash from burning wood in the bush. This ash is a basic ingredient of potash which is used for food preparation and soap making. They also clear the fields in preparation for ploughing and planting.
The traditional women’s associations in the villages where J&D works have requested assistance to find appropriate technology to reduce their workload and to develop income generating activities.

Low levels of literacy and enrolment in school : School enrolment only became an issue in 1997 with the introductions of community schools. Before this there were only three state schools in the area. The national NGO Asa Subaahi Gumo (ASG) in partnership with Save the Children (USA) created 25 community schools. These schools have a relatively small intake and take on new pupils every two or three years, depending on the village.

Only 2 or 3% of the population are literate. The Malian Cotton Company used to organise intensive literacy training over 45 days each year, principally for those concerned with organising cotton production in the villages.

The above issues were highlighted during research initiated by J&D using participatory rural appraisal techniques with representatives of different social groups in the communities concerned. The priorities identified form the basis of the development programme agreed by the Communal Councils of Sibirila and Yinindougou and co-ordinated by J&D.

The different activities are:

Health and community distribution of medicines and contraceptives : In collaboration with the health centres J&D health workers offer health care and implement a strategy to make health services as accessible as possible to distant and isolated communities. Basic medicines and contraceptives are sold in these villages by community members who receive training and are supported by J&D workers. The same people also provide information to their communities concerning appropriate use of these products and organise regular discussions around topical health issues such as childhood illnesses and HIV/Aids.

J&D aims to strengthen the capacity of community health associations and to encourage people to become members of their local association. Membership cards entitle one to reduced fees and the money they generate helps to fund local health services.

Support to women’s groups : This support aims to improve the organisational and management capacity of women’s organisations. An initial institutional analysis helps to highlight strengths and weaknesses in an association and J&D then works with the members to improve the weaknesses and build on the strengths.

The women in Lemouroutoumou have an association called “ Benkadi” which means “It’s good to understand one another”. This group have benefited from money raised by an NGO in England called the Mali Development Group (MDG). They have purchased a grain grinding mill which will greatly reduce their workload. J&D has worked with members of the board, the mill management committee and the millers to offer training and preparation for the arrival of the mill. The community of Lemouroutoumou have built the mill house and the money used to buy the mill will be reimbursed over time to be used by another village.

Reflect : Reflect is a strategy we have used to introduce literacy and to integrate the different aspects of the programme. Participants in each village belong to Reflect learning circles where they discuss and analyse various aspects of their daily lives and develop solutions to various problems while learning to read and write using material they have created themselves, based on their local reality. J&D has supported initiatives by Reflect circles to create market gardens in Lemouroutoumou, Farabalé, Diendjo. Similarly health committees have been set up in Madina and Banankélé to clean up the village to reduce the risk of malaria. J&D is supporting the developpment of a community newspaper and other initiatives to encourage the growth of a more literate environment.

Civic Education: Each village where J&D works has set up a civic education centre, usually coordinated by the facilitators of the Reflect circle. Documents and audio cassettes concerning legal and other issues of public interest are located in these centres, alongside video equipement and radio cassette players. They are produced in Bambara, the local language, and often provide the first opportunity people have to understand and discuss the laws of the land and the constitution which are officially written in French. J&D provides training and support for representatives from each village so that they can lead discussions, provide information and answer questions concerning civic education issues. This is particularly important in the context of a developing democracy and the decentralisation of ressources and decision making that Mali has undertaken as national policy.

There is still a long way to go before these communities, virtually bypassed by technical progress and globalisation, can fulfil their dreams and expectations. The fragility of the new local institutions set up with the introduction of decentralised government to make a reality of Mali’s democracy, means that the communities of Manankoro will need continuing support from civil society organisations, such as J&D and its partners, for some years to come.

The Timbuktu Libraries
	Back to Timbuktu Libraries Homepage

The Niger Bend is to West Africa what the Nile Valley is to Egypt: an ecological life source and a
civilizational magnet. The great northward curve of the river Niger has allowed for the settlement of
populations along a vast stretch of well-watered land. Historically, the Niger also provided a great
highway of communication across the region and provided a link between the lands of the desert and
North Africa and the lands of the savannahs and forests in the South. The intensive and extensive human
activity that has taken place in this region for thousands of years has left behind its traces in a large
number of archaeological sites. Only a few of these have been scientifically explored, while many have
been brutally exploited by local treasure hunters.

Over the past 600-700 years another legacy has developed: that of the literate culture of Islam
symbolized by the extraordinary richness of private collections of Arabic manuscripts that still survive,
often precariously, in the Niger valley and its desert hinterland. Timbuktu, located on the northern most
bend of the River Niger in Mali, was a celebrated centre of Islamic learning from the fourteenth century
onwards. Not only were books brought into the city, but local scholars wrote their own works and there is
also evidence of a sophisticated local book copying industry in Timbuktu.

The historic city of Timbuktu, now the administrative centre of Mali’s Sixth Region, lies at a
crucial point where the Sahara desert meets the river Niger. Its geographical setting made it a natural
meeting point for settled African populations and nomadic Berber and Arab peoples. Founded around the
year 1100 CE, it rapidly became a focal point for caravan commerce originating in North Africa or the
Saharan oases. The city’s rapidly growing prosperity, soon attracted scholars to it from many quartersfrom
Mediterranean Africa, from the Saharan oases and from West African towns such as Jenne and
Walata.

By the mid-fifteenth century Timbuktu was as much a city of learning as it was a city of
commerce. The scholars who settled there brought their libraries with them, and avidly purchased
manuscript books imported from North Africa and Egypt. Leo Africanus remarked on the “numerous
judges, scholars and priests [i.e. imams], all well paid by the king, who shows great respect to men of
learning”, and added “Many manuscript books coming from Barbary are sold. Such sales are more
profitable than any other goods.” Books were not only imported to Timbuktu, they were also copied
there, and it was the local copying tradition that enabled Timbuktu scholars to build up their own libraries.
By the fifteenth century, the city’s scholars were writing their own books for teaching purposes
and to satisfy a demand for scholarly works in law, Qur’anic study, traditions of the Prophet Muhammad,
theology, and Arabic language, and a more popular demand for pietistic literature and poetry in praise of
the Prophet.

In the sixteenth century we see the emergence of local chronicles and biographical dictionaries.
During the period of the Askiyas (or rulers) of the Songhay empire (1493-1591), there was considerable
support for the Muslim scholars of the city, many of whom lived in the northern quarter around the
celebrated Sankoré Mosque. Some received gifts from the rulers in cash and kind, and the renovation of
the city’s mosques was underwritten by the state. One of the rulers, Askiya Dawud (who reigned 1549-83)
is said to have established public libraries in his kingdom.

But the principal resource of Timbuktu scholarship lay in the private libraries of individual
scholars and some of these libraries were evidently quite large. The celebrated scholar Ahmad Baba (d.
1627), who was among those deported to Morocco in 1593 following the Moroccan conquest of Timbuktu
and the Songhay empire, complained to the sultan of Morocco that his library of 1,600 books had been
plundered, and his library, so he said, was one of the smaller in the city.

To this day the city still boasts some 60-80 private collections, the largest of which, the Mamma
Haidara Memorial Library, has been rehabilitated through a grant from the Mellon Foundation, while a
catalogue of its contents is being published by the Al-Furqan Islamic Foundation. The Fondo Kati Library
is now under construction with financing from the Spanish Gabinete del Consejero de Relaciones Institucionales.
The contents of several other private collections were acquired by the Ahmad Baba Institute, a public institution that now contains
over 18,000 manuscripts.

Efforts are now being made to preserve this literary heritage, beginning with some of the major
collections of the city of Timbuktu. This is an urgent mission, since poverty is leading to the sale of some
fine items, while climate and insects continue to take their toll on the fragile paper.

An encouraging report on education in Mali . Here’s a few translated snippets:

2006, like the three previous years, was a year of action for basic education, marked by the development of infrastructures, provision of equipment and the training of personnel. School authorities indicate that 60 young graduates have been trained in the rules of transcription of national languages, and people from the académies d’enseignement and the local CAPs have been given technical training in follow-up evaluation and a reinforcement of their linguistic competencies. School directors have received training in the new curriculum, level 1, and the department of education has run a number of workshops and seminars to reinforce the abilities of trainers.

The non-formal education policy document has been finalised as part of phase 1 of the war against poverty and the preparation of the report of that phase [Janet, Thomas and I went to the validation workshop for this last year]. Further training sessions are planned in order to guard the health of the education system.

As regards environmental education and the techniques of environmental education: training has been given to 1152 school directors, 40 national level trainers, 776 local level trainers, 203 professors at the teacher training institute, 128 educators at education centres, and 3,000 teachers and 5 educators of kindergartens. There has also been follow-up support in 73 establishments, sensitisation campaigns in secondary and higher schools, and a debate on radio. Two new modules on environmental education will be introduced into secondary and higher schools. School textbooks have been revised together with teacher’s notes and activity workbooks for the 4th and 5th years of basic education, and the training modules have been adapted at the teacher training institute.

Results from examinations have shown a good increase in the pass rate over the last four years: for the certificate at the end of the 6th year of schooling - 70% passed; diploma of fundamental education (end of year 9) - more than 62% passed; the technical BAC - almost 71% passed; the general BAC 48.12% passed.

 From OXFAM America

AJA-MALI: EDUCATION FOR EMPLOYMENT IS THE GOAL

by Chris Hufstader

A small organization in Mali blazes a path in alternative education, helping young entrepreneurs get the training they need to build a better future.

There’s a simple way of explaining the work of the Association Jeunesse Action (Youth Action Association, or AJA) in Mali’s capital of Bamako.  AJA’s director Souleymanne Sarr puts it very directly: “The goal of our program is to create a Mali without unemployment.”

Like many other poor countries, there is a dearth of opportunity for young people in Mali.  The economy is small, the country is in debt, and there aren’t many businesses hiring workers. High unemployment is partly due to lack of education, which some people can’t afford, but it is also due to the wrong kind of education.  Government-run schools are generally overcrowded and under funded. They train students for regular jobs in companies and factories, when most of the economic activity is out on the street, in small-scale, entrepreneurial businesses.

Sarr saw the need for better training for employment in the real world of Bamako.  Oxfam America helped him and his colleagues establish AJA in 1996.  They built up the training program, created ways to fund the organization, and became an effective advocate for alternative education in the government.

AJA is now on the verge of self sufficiency.  It’s a model partnership, and shows what committed people with good ideas can do to spark progress when they get the right support.

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