By Ousmane Coulibaly, Operations Manager

Building and opening a new school is one of the most exciting activities at Mali Rising Foundation. However, once the school is complete we turn the building over to the local village to own and manage. This is a big responsibility, and maintenance requires skills. That’s why one of the ways we work with our partner villages is on-going maintenance trainings.  

To keep the schools safe and comfortable, we train School Management Committees – which are kind of like the PTAs in the U.S. – in various skills.  I recently trained the Committee at both Lareen Mellor Middle School and Gary Hudson Elementary School.

These trainings focused specifically on repairing desks, which are put under a lot of stress in classrooms which sometimes house 100 or more students!  During the training, we first identify the problems with the desks and then we figure out how to repair them.

According to M. Yaya Sacko, President of the School Committee at Gary Hudson Elementary School:

“This desk maintenance training was very useful and it will help us a lot in the future. It allowed us to learn the different steps and processes of repairing the desks. It also allowed us to know the tools needed to properly repair the desks.”

The desks maintenance training initiated by Mali Rising Foundation will allow different Committees’ members to repair the desks themselves and that will permit children to have more desks in the classrooms.

Mali Rising will continue our desk maintenance trainings and will add a training on repairing floors in the classrooms later this year. All of this work gives the local community more control of and investment in their school – which is a great thing!