By Hindaty Traore, Girls Project Manager

To help students dream about what they want to do in the future, connect their dreams to education, and create a plan for what they need to do to achieve their dreams, we at Mali Rising Foundation recently hosted a Career Day at one of our schools.

The Career Day brought 5 different speakers to the school to share their stories and information about their careers. This activity allowed the students to ask questions and aroused curiosity in some students to learn more about jobs even beyond those our speakers addressed.

The students asked relevant questions to the guests. Some of these questions were, "Did  you ever have a problem in your career that almost made you give up?" or “I want to be a doctor, which school should I choose?”

But I personally saw one student – Kanouya – who really made it clear just how inspiring the speakers were to the students. I spoke with her after the event, and this is what she told me:

"My name is Kanouya  Dembele.  I am 16 years old. I am in the 9th year at the middle school of  Seguessona. I live a little far from school, so I walk the road to school leaving at 6:30 or 7:00 each monring. My mother supports my education but my father does not. I understand that because he has not been to school. So it doesn't give enough importance to education. My parents have three children. I'm the only girl, and that's why my mother loves that I study.

I really like education because my father's educated nieces and nephews all had a good job, they are independent and have money. I envy them a lot. That's why I'd like to study to be like them. My mother also encourages me a lot to be like my cousins.

After my studies, I would like to be an accountant to have money and help my parents. As my father does gardening, I would like to help him with more advanced techniques I learned while I was at school. I would also like to hire workers to do the hard work so that my father doesn't get too tired. For my mother, as she loves business, I will give her a business to realize her dream.

One of my dreams is to bring a well to my village so that the whole village benefits from my education. Because we have a water problem -- we are forced to go to fetch water very far from home.

I really enjoyed the five speakers, even if the career I like was not invited, I could even understand a lot of things about other jobs like the agriculture speaker that I could say to my father. I loved their journey and -- Inshallah --  I would like to one day tell my story like them."  

This first Career Day was a pilot or test to see if it was useful to the students and successful. Overall, we found it was really popular and measurably improved students’ understanding of career options and how they can plan to achieve their goals. You can read the measurable results in this blog post, but this qualitative story from Kanouya means just as much to me as the numbers!