Blog
At Mali Rising Foundation, we’re thrilled to kick off another year of transformative French language classes! This month, our dedicated team is conducting pre-assessments across ten villages to prepare for the 2024-25 school year classes. Over the past two years, thanks to the generous support of our donors, the French Language Improvement Project has helped more than 200 7th graders — and this year we will expand to serve 400 students!
One of the biggest obstacles students in Mali face is language. Although students in our villages grow up hearing and speaking their local language (Bambara), school is taught in French. In primary school students are « eased » into French instruction, but by 7th grade all classes are taught in French. So, if you haven’t learned French by then you are often just out of luck! That’s where Mali Rising’s FLIP campaign comes in.
This school year, we will host 18 Teacher Peer Meetings, where we bring together teachers to help each improve their skills. With so much work going into organizing these meetings, I always want to check in the teachers to make sure they are useful for their work. At a recent peer meeting, I had a great conversation with one teacher who was brand new to the idea of Peer Meetings – Abdoulaye Doumbia.
Way back in the early days of the pandemic, we — like everyone else — were scrambling to find ways to keep our kids connected to school as things shut down. School closures in Mali were total…there is no online learning in our remote, rural villages! One tool we decided to test was incredibly simple, but turned out to also be incredibly engaging. That tool is a set of simple, photocopied workbooks we distributed in our villages.
Mali Rising’s goal is to see our students succeed, which means helping them stay connected with learning even during a pandemic. To that end, our ongoing take-home workbook project continues to make difference for our kids and makes many parents proud of their children. An example of these outcomes can be found at The Mindful Bunch Middle School of Kafara. Students at this partner school have been working hard to make their parents proud of them. Although school was closed for months due to the pandemic, students at The Mindful Bunch Middle School have been working hard on our take-home workbooks, staying connected with learning and language.
Abdoulaye Coulibaly is the principal of Mindful Bunch Middle School of Kafara. He is 33 years old and father of 3 children. Mr. Coulibaly says many people in Karafa cannot even find words to express their feelings when it comes to talking about the importance of Mindful Bunch Middle School. Mr. Coulibaly estimates that 99% of the people in Kafara think their middle school allowed them to be closer to their kids and be able to watch over the kids and their education. Their kids have been studying in their own village and do not have to walk miles any more to get to school.
Ousmane Samaké is a 7th grader in The Mindful Bunch Middle school in the village of Kafara. He is 15 years old and says he misses his classmates so much. Ousmane has not been in school for months because of teacher’s strike in Mali followed by the COVID-19 pandemic that hit the whole world. Read more about Ousmane…
Here in the U.S., parents and teachers often worry about the “summer slide” — a dip in students’ academic skills caused by summertime disengagement from learning. In Mali this year, we are triple-y concerned about a slide — students missed months of school from a teacher strike followed by a several month closure for COVID-19, followed by summer break. What to do to help kids stay connected to learning!? Given the reality that our students have no books in their homes and absolutely no access to online learning, we are going old school!
Right now, a group of dedicated supporters is walking in our Miles for Mali event to raise funds to build a new school for the kids of a little village called N’Goko. (You could join us!) A new school means new hope for hundreds of students…just ask Seydou, a young man benefiting from a school we built in his village in 2018…
On this Thursday morning we woke in the big city of Bamako, but immediately headed south to the “big” town of Ouelessebougou. Ouelessebougou is home to our own kind of “home-away-from-home” hotel for me, the staff, and Tim, but it was a new experience for Courtney. As hotels go, it is pretty basic — no hot water, no sheets, no towels, etc. BUT it does have a wonderful mango tree in a little courtyard that serves us quite well as an office and living room. Before making ourselves at home at the hotel though, we had to get some work done. First, we visited the village of Kafara and then we headed on the long drive to Kolimba.
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