By Alou Doumbia, Field Director

Just like everyone around the world, we have been working hard to understand the impact of COVID-19 on our lives and our work. All of the Mali staff or Mali Rising have been gathering information weekly from our 23 partner villages. We also recently reviewed the results of a national survey carried out in June 2020 by the Malian government in collaboration with the World Bank. I wanted to share what we understand from the national survey and discuss how that information may affect our future work.

In Mali 99.3% of families have heard of the coronavirus and 8 out of 10 families are aware of rules of conduct for reducing the risk of contamination.

73.7% of people know about the prevention measures generally. However, the preventive measures are not well understood by people. The measure they know the best is the curfew (55% of families). The measure that is least understood is restriction on travelling and that measure is only known by 11% of families across the country. More than 94% of families have received information on social distancing through radio and television lessons. However, the least mentioned source of information is the newspaper and signs with posters.

In Mali, 82% of families are satisfied with the government's response to the coronavirus crisis in the villages. For those unsatisfied with government response to the crisis, they mainly cite the lack of financial assistance according to 40% of households.

Almost 9 out of 10 of families wash their hands more often than usual, while 61.7% of households have not as been going to the places of worship as usual. Only 12.9% of families say they respect all distancing behavior. The crisis has not severely impacted the families in terms of getting basic needs. However, prices have gone up, which prevented 17.5% of families from having basic supplies.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic 32.6% of households have needed medical care in rural areas and 91.3% of these households have been able to access that.

37% of children continue to have educational and learning activities despite the school closure and access to home lessons and 35% do homework sent by teachers, while only 0.7% watch online lessons and 7.1% attend Koranic school. 93.7% of families were able to access financial services.

39.4% of the jobs that were available before the outbreak of covid19 have disappeared and 3.4% of households with a family business lost their income.

53% of families were worried about not getting enough to eat and among them 70% were hungry and 68.6% had nothing to eat at home.

Setting the curfew slowed down the activities of 28.3% of households.  Closing the borders and forbidding more than 50 people gathering as a group impacted the activities of 25.5% of families. A very few families received support from the government, only 3.2% of families received assistance in food. Families in Bamako got more government assistance -40%, whereas 33% in rural areas received support from religious organizations.

This information is important as Mali Rising works to figure out the best ways to support our partner villages during these tough times. We have been providing health tools, delivering take-home lessons for students, and more. But clearly there are larger societal concerns that may loom ever larger as the crisis continues. We are committed to sticking by our partner villages and helping in any ways we can!