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.”

aj/cb

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

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 

 

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.

A one-woman campaign to help one Malian vilage take control of Malaria prevention for themselves by teaching them about treating bednets for themselves.

Read the full article at:http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/marapr/dept/email.html

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.