More Girls in Mali are Going to School
 CIDA is committed to supporting
the reform of Mali’s education system.
These girls and boys are pupils at
the little community school in Sébénikoro,
a suburb of Bamako. |
At the little community school in Sébénikoro, a suburb of Bamako, 562 pupils aged 5 to 12 share seven classrooms. Luckily, they are very well behaved. They keep their eyes focused on the blackboard or their textbooks. They listen to their teachers and recite their lessons.
Of these 562 pupils, 320 are girls. In Mali, people often feel it is a waste of time and money to send a girl to school, so this high enrolment rate for girls may come as a surprise. “We have to debunk some myths,” explains the school’s headmaster, Modibo Diané. “Little girls are good for more than just taking care of their little brothers or doing the laundry!”
At the school in Sébénikoro, girls are not only actively recruited but also carefully supervised. “We offer them free remedial classes,” the headmaster proudly notes. He then laments that few girls make it to high school.
The chair of the school management committee, Siaka Keita, agrees: “We realize the importance of education for girls. Running a school without girls would be like walking on only one foot.”
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The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) is helping Mali’s education system to keep both feet firmly planted on the ground. Through the project to improve the quality of basic education, CIDA is helping Mali’s Ministry of National Education to improve pupils’ learning conditions. The project will achieve this objective in two ways. It will ensure that pupils have enough textbooks of sufficient quality. It will also improve teachers’ skills and working conditions.
The Ministry is committed to considering gender equality in all components of the project. It has pledged to promote greater access to education for girls, eliminate all sexist stereotypes in course content, and raise the percentage of women teachers.
This seems to be a sticking point for administrators at the school in Sébénikoro, where all of the teachers are men. “Men are always available,” Siaka Keita explains. “Women have too much to do at home to meet the demands of being a teacher,” he adds.
This situation is deplorable, says Maria Trigueiro, coordinater of the Gender and Development Fund for CIDA, “Girls in school need to see women as authority figures, as something other than a wife or mother.”
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