By Ousmane Coulibaly, Operations Manager

Are you a skilled DIYer? What if you had to do the repairs at your kid’s school….would your skills hold up for that DIY job? Maybe not, but if you had a little help maybe you could feel good about contributing back to the school. That’s what our school maintenance trainings do for parents on our partner schools’ School Management Committeees.

Currently, we offer two types of maintenance trainings — how to repair desks and how to fix cracks and holes in school floors. These are common problems at the schools, but they have pretty simple fixes.

This month, I conducted both a floor and desk maintenance training at Little Heroes Academy I in Mana. We taught the school committee (kind of like school boards or the PTA in the US) the basic skills they needed to do repairs. We also provided a loaned set of tools and granted some of the basic materials (e.g., screws, cement) needed to tackle the jobs.

Mr. Fany Doumbia, president of the School Management Committee of Little Heroes Academy I, declared. "This training is really useful, and I am sure it will be very beneficial to us in the future. The repair techniques that Mali Rising just taught will allow us to repair our schools without spending a lot of money.'"

I’ve done more than a dozen of these trainings over the last year and I see two common themes. First, school committee members feel very proud of their new skills and are glad to put them into action. Second, they almost all say the work is easy and they can’t believe how much they used to pay someone to do it for them!

Having this kind of local support for the schools is so important to their long-term sustainability and success. Thanks to Mali Rising’s supporters we can be sure that we not only build schools but keep them safe places for learning for decades of students!