By Hindaty Traore, Girls Project Manager

Reading is the heart of knowledge, yet many children in Mali cannot read. In fact, many students fail school all together because, when you do not know how to read the lesson, you cannot learn the lesson nor understand its meaning.

This is a problem we must address! As Mali’s new school year begins this month, I am helping our Girls’ Project girls improve their reading ability through our study sessions. During monthly study sessions, I work with our girls using a basic reading primer to help them build their skills. Then, we send the girls home with short stories (we call these Reading Worksheets) that are fun and interesting for the girls to read. Each Worksheet has three different activities for the girls to practice their reading with until our next study session.

Despite the schools closure due to Covid-19, this month we met the girls of the Girls’ Project to launch this campaign to improve their reading. For the first session, we used a little grade 1 class reading book. Seeing the book, the girls burst out laughing because they think reading this book will be like drinking water — so easy you don’t even need to think about it! But once they started reading most of them couldn't read certain words. The girls admitted it is a humiliation not to be able to read this little book.

For example, Setou is 16 years old and is in the 9th grade class at the Trujillo Family Middle School in N’Tentou. She lives in a neighboring village with her parents, 4 brothers, and 5 sisters.

After several years of participating in the Girls Project, Setou has forged a strong temperament and does not hesitate to take on all the challenges that come her way in everyday life. One of the major challenges Setou encounters is the distance to be covered to reach her school each morning. In fact, she gets up at 5:00 am, gets ready, and leaves the house by 6:00 am with her siblings. The five children walk over an hour's time to reach their school. But for Setou school is worth the challenge. Once in school, she is happy to learn all kinds of new things, but she especially loves the Girls’ Project meetings. Every evening after her meal, Setou hurries to do her homework.

After discovering during our study session that she could not read the Grade 1 book, Setou told me she plans to spend part of every night reading the Reading Worksheets distributed by Girl Project. Setou laughed and said, “It was fortunate the students of the first grade were not present, because otherwise it would be an embarrassing disaster for us older girls.”

Although she loves English, she finds it very interesting to learn to read French first before learning English because all other lessons are given in French. Setou fears that maybe her poor reading skills will cause her to fail the graduation exam this year. She challenged herself to learn how to read the book properly within three months.

Our Girls’ Project work is all about encouraging girls like Setou to set goals for themselves and achieve them. Thanks to Mali Rising’s donors, we’ll be there to help Setou all along her path to reading prowess!