Sociolingo’s Mali

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.”

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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 

 

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.

From BBC News

Mali’s book festival spreads reading joy

Mali has an oral storytelling tradition

Despite being a country with one of the lowest literacy rates on the planet, Mali has celebrated one of the world’s most interesting and lively literary festivals - Astonishing Travellers. The festival features workshops in poetry and screenplay writing, with a grand donation of 15,000 books being made to the country’s school libraries.

Moussa Konate, the festival’s founder and director, said it has had two consistent main aims since it was founded - to promote African writers, and to cement the place of books in Malian and African culture, which has previously been mostly an oral one.

“We need to create a readership - that’s why we’ve placed so much emphasis on working with students,” he told BBC World Service’s The Word programme.

“Reading isn’t really a common pursuit, but once you introduce children to books, they might stick with them and become the readers of tomorrow.”

‘Writers are not dead’

Astonishing Travellers this year hosted 58 writers from the African continent and the dispora.

Meeting a writer is a fortune I never had Waberi Abdourahman

It has expanded to a running length of a week and a half, and took place simultaniously in each of Mali’s nine provinces - confirming its immense growth from a single day in a small venue in Bamako.

Authors such as Senegal’s Aminata Sow Fall and Congolese Amba Bongo met schoolchildren, students and adult readers at venues all over the country.

Fiction writer Waberi Abdourahman - born in Djibouti but who now lives in France - said what is interesting is being able to meet young people “so that they see a writer is not always someone who died centuries ago”.

“For a young man like me, I have the opportunity to discuss every issue with them,” he added.

“I was struck by the fact that they are so much more realisitic than I was. They asked me why I believe in a United States of Africa, and yet live in France. These are hard questions.”

He added that he had never had the chance to meet a writer when he lived in Djibouti, describing it as “a fortune I never had”.

But Paris-based African-American writer Eddie Harris, who was attending the festival for the first time, said that he did not “recognise or understand” the lack of commercial opportunity at the festival.

“The readers - the people encountering us - aren’t going to rush out and buy the books; I don’t know if there’s that connection,” he said.

“When you go to a conference like this in America or France, the ultimate aim is to increase sales. Here, I don’t think it’s the case - partly because books are such a luxury, and partly because illiteracy is so high.”

On 4th September the World Bank gave Mali 35 million dollars to use for education. The representative of the World Bank gave the cheque to the Minister of Economy and Finance as part of Phase 2 of the investment in the education sector (PISE) in order to improve the quality of education and to make the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) possible in Mali. The funding is specifically to help reduce the number of children who abandon primary education, reduce the regional differences in between boys and girls, and also to help with the better utilisation of funding in the primary sector. The Minister reported that the rate of enrollement has risen in the last 10 years from 47.8% IN 1995/6 TO 72% IN 2004/5. The education budget has also risen from 3.02% in 2000 to 3.24% in 2004.

For full report in French see http://www.essor.gov.ml/

The Malian newspaper Les Echos reports on the workshop held in Bamako, 5-8th September on the development of a literate environment in Mali.

In order to mark International Literacy Day (September 8th), the Ministry of Education and its partners is holding a major 4 day workshop in Bamako with 102 participants from governmental departments and non-governmental organisations. The aim of the workshop is to identify and debate how to develop a literate environment in Mali and to develop integrated strategies to achieve this. The development of a literate environment is actually the second part of the 10 year plan for the development of Education in Mali (PRODEC), and is allied to the Literacy for LIFE movement of UNESCO.

I think that the problem with these sorts of initiative is that it is all very well to talk, and a lot of talking will have gone on in the workshop, but all too often that is all there is. This initiative needs to be backed by action and perhaps changes in legislation in order to really change things. The workshop raises the questions of ‘what is a literate society and what are the criteria for judging the success of becoming a literate society? These are questions that will be well-debated in the workshop.

One of the biggest problems is the lack of reading materials in Malian languages. In previous workshops and for many years materials/texts have been written, but they are still not published. This is a major area that needs to be addressed if there is going to be any real change.

Mali has gone a long way in recent years to develop education in Malian languages alongside French in the Primary sector (for the first 6 years). These young people will grow up with a different attitude to language than their parents. But if there is nothing for them to read as they are growing up they will lose the incentive to read for pleasure in their own languages. It really is imperative to address this reading desert.