By Alou Doumbia, Construction Manager

When Mali Rising builds a new school, student desks are part of the equipment provided to the school. This is an obvious need – it is hard to make the most of a classroom if you do not have anywhere to sit! However, solving one problem can sometimes create other challenges. We have a new campaign underway to keep school desks in good shape, and I’d like to tell you about that campaign today.

In past years, the government could not or would not provide desks for schools. As a result, parents were forced to make a small table for each child when they were enrolled in school. Each child then carried their desk on their head to school and returned after lunch with the same desk. It was tiring for the children.

Organizations, including Mali Rising, have come to the aid of the students by building more classrooms equipped with desks and other tables. This is a great thing, but we found that the management of this furniture began to give rise to problems. For example, sometimes children have fun on the benches in the absence of the teachers. Or during te major festivals in the villages, the desks are requisitioned by the village and transported to public places, on their return some tables are damaged.

When desks are broken, the school management committee is obliged to repair them on the eve of each new school year. Often the committee sends the desks to carpenters and they are transported very far to be repaired. Very few school management committees keep funds in their coffers that can cover this expense. Before the opening of classes, to repair these bench tables, some management committee chairmen commit themselves out of honor to repair desks, while some committees go into debt with carpenters to repair them while waiting for funds to enter their coffers.

When we talked with our school committee partners, we found almost no one has thought that members of the school management committee could do the repair of these benches. Repairing desks is easy. Most of the desks are quite basic, and often repairs are as simple as replacing bolts that fall out when kids are playing on the desk.

To repair a table, all you need is a screw, a No.10 bolt, a vice-driver, pliers, a hammer and a No.10 wrench. In dire cases, there is a device called a rechargeable drill that is used to make the hole in the table when the old hole is unusable.

In May, I piloted our first school committee training in how to repair the desks. We tested the idea at Frances W. Burton Middle School in the village of Tamala. As we explained to the school committee, the purpose of this training is to help the members of the school management committees of our partner schools create initiatives that reduce their expenses.

When we started the training, the members present were not cheerful and thought that it was an additional activity that was being added to their many occupations. During the training however, they realized that repairing the desks was actually quite easy. When we moved from the explanation to hands on practice, they were shocked to find the repairs were even easier. Some school committee member exclaimed that carpenters make easy money on them! In fact, we found that many bench tables only needed tightening of the bolts to be strong.

This training aroused great interest for the school committee members present. Despite their initial grumpiness, by the end of the event they told me they welcomed the initiative and that it had opened their minds. We plan to extend the training to other partner schools over the next few months, with a full rollout next school year!