By Adama Kone, Teacher Project Coordinator

Mali is a country that prioritizes education, despite the many challenges we face with poverty, unrest, and of course the pandemic. One of the biggest challenges for the authorities (and for Mali Rising!) is keeping kids in school until they graduate from middle school. With multiple gold mining areas calling to kids with get-rich-quick dreams, the rural exodus of kids to work and get money, and the long distances walking or biking to get to school every day, many children drop out before they graduate.

With the aim of helping stop drop outs, the Mali government has been thinking about many strategies like school lunch program, parent’s involvement, etc. In previous years, many of those strategies did not work very well. However, two years ago, we started noticing a strategy that seemed promising. The government was creating school lunch programs in some rural schools, including some Mali Rising Foundation schools just like Ross and Marilou Moser Middle School of Nieguekoro and the Cliff and Nita Bailey Middle School of Beneko.

The goal of the school lunch program is to encourage students to like school and work hard. The appeal of a healthy, big meal motivates students to attend school and parents to send their kids to school.

A group of women is selected by school committee with collaboration of elders in the village to cook lunch each day, Monday through Friday. In some villages, those women are younger but they are older in many other villages because usually the older women have less work than younger ones in villages.

Most of the time lunch is rice with leaves [note: kind of like spinach leaves, sweet potato leaves, etc.] sauce. In the picture here, we are in Beneko, one of our partner villages, where older women cook school lunches from Monday through Friday. They first bring huge cooking pots in school every morning and look for firewood then start cooking in the schoolyard under a tree.

While they are cooking, kids in classrooms feel hungry and are so excited that they cannot wait for the lunch break, which is at 12 o’clock. Once it is noon, children from both primary and middle schools are all excited to eat. Women usually make sure the lunch is ready in time so hungry and impatient kids do not get rowdy while they are waiting!

At noon, those women take food out of giant cooking pots and put it into different large plates. There are usually dozens of plates for hundreds of kids in school and they split themselves up between plates so everyone can have enough food. It is traditional to eat from a large shared plate using your hands, and the students dig right in — usually sharing a plate with their closest friends just like kids in the United States would share a lunch table.

Some of our students confirmed that this is one of their favorite times in school because they all get together to eat and tease each other while eating. The lunch program means the do not have to travel back and forth any more for lunches. This is a relief given that  some are from villages  about 3 to 5 km away from school. Therefore, the school lunch saves them from walking or riding bicycles. It also makes many students enjoy coming to school because not only do they eat all together but they also get types of food in school that are hard to have back home, such as rice with good sauces.