By Hindaty Traore, Girls Project Manager
At Mali Rising, our Girls’ Project does a lot to get girls into school and help them succeed there – from tutoring to soccer matches to school fee subsidies. However, sometimes we are reminded that even the basic act of building a school literally opens doors to girls in search of an education. I was reminded of this recently during a discussion with a mother of one of our students.
Sitan Samaké has a daughter enrolled at Mali Rising’s Trujillo Family Middle School in N’Tentou. This is was the very first school Mali Rising ever built. Mrs. Samaké told me that before we built this school, the students walked 6 to 7 km each way to get to the nearest middle school. This led many students to drop out of school, especially girls.
Mrs. Samaké (far right, in blue) watches a girls’ soccer match at the Trujillo Family Middle School, along with other mothers and younger children.
It was very difficult for a girl to walk that distance due to danger of abduction or rap on the trip. In addition, the time the walk took from the day made it hard for girls to fit it into their busy days, and boys were always prioritized over girls for the use of limited bicycles to shorten the trip.
Mrs. Samaké explained that these problems pushed some parents to send their children away to a bigger town to continue their studies, but that had its own problems. In many cases, students faced housing difficulties, hunger, and ill-treatment at the places they stayed. In addition, parents had to provide the landlord with food and money. For example, Mrs. Samaké said it was typical to provide a contribution estimated at 5000 FCFA and two bags of cereal for each child. This represented a cost many families could not carry. Not to mention that once away from home, some children misbehave, are resistant to good social rules, or become unrecognizable to their own mothers, according to Mrs. Samaké.
Today, it has been more than 15 years since the Trujillo Family Middle School was built in N’Tentou. Mrs. Samaké notes that hundreds of children and their parents have been spared from the dangers of long school trips or moving to a big town for the study. She feels that having the school so close has especially helped the girl students, who might have been forced to abandon school altogether due to the dangers of community. According to the mothers of N’Tentou, Mrs. Samaké says that with their own school their girls are now more goal-orientated, more determined, and more motivated to continue their studies after graduating from middle school.
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