By Hindaty Traore, Girls’ Project Manager

A key new part of our Girls’ Project focuses on helping participating girls learn to read – and to love reading! This campaign -- Great Girls Read – works with girls all school year long to help them improve their reading skills and find joy in reading fun and engaging short pieces designed just for them.

After spending a whole school year in Great Girls Read, we wanted to give our girls a chance to show off their new reading skills. Hence, we organized a public reading competition between the girls in each of our five Project villages.

This competition was a revelation for many girls. Why? Before Great Girls Read, it was impossible to be able to read well in front of other people…let alone in front of a crowd!

One girl, ninth grader Salimatou Samaké of Frances W. Burton Middle School, volunteered for the competion. During the first round, Salimatou had a trembling voice during the first session, but by the next round she was able to speak solidly and feel proud. Salimatou didn't win Best Reader, but she was among the finalists. Salimatou told me, “I want to receive the winner's crown next year and make my parents proud of me.”

We had 60 volunteer readers in the five villages. All the girls received a gift just for being brave enough to try.  All the girls were excited for the contest. Some parents told me that their daughters spent all their time with their texts preparing, and only talked about the reading contest for the week leading up to the contest. This shows that the girls really took the competition it to heart.

Aminata Siaka Samaké is 13 years old and is the 9th grade at Tim Gibson Middle School in Sebela. Aminata is very happy to have won the reading contest in her village. According to Aminata, she had great difficulty with reading. Thanks to the Great Girls Read sessions, she has improved a lot and in addition it has revealed positive skills that she was unaware she could develop such as looking up the meaning of the words in the texts and of having self-confidence in front of everyone in reading.

Now, Aminata reads every day and she says she often does it with her friends. "I am always happy to have our reading sessions because it allowed me to understand a lot of things in my lessons and especially the texts that we are given. By reading these texts, you always learn new things. Even if we often don't understand at the beginning, in the end we manage to enrich our vocabulary,” said Aminata.

“My mother is very proud of me because the prizes were awarded in her presence, which made me even more happy,” continued Aminata. “I think that thanks to this victory in this competition my father will let me do longer studies. I would like to become a doctor. I am inspired to do this to treat mom because she is always sick and I would like it to stop. No one will fall ill in my family. I admire what the Girls’ Project does for us because it encouraged me a lot to succeed and I will never stop thanking them.”

"Aminata is my daughter, my greatest pride because she has just honored me in front of the whole village by winning this prize in the reading contest. At the beginning when I saw her with her texts I laughed because I said that she was pretending to read,” said Awa Diarra, Aminata’s mother. “Even if you asked her to do housework, she said she absolutely had to learn to read the text before Hindaty arrived. In any case, it was a good thing because it allowed my daughter to know how to read and to better concentrate on her studies. Even her father will be proud of her today, and he who doesn't like girls' studies.”

The need for help with reading is enormous in Mali’s schools. Generally, I estimate that more than 80% of 7th grade girls entering middle school are unable to read a sentence correctly. Children who leave primary school for middle school in Mali have a lot of gaps in reading. This makes understanding the lessons very difficult. This can also be the cause of school dropouts of some students, especially girls. They get frustrated when they don’t understand lessons, and we lose them.

By reading a text aloud or hearing a text read by another, the girls enriched their vocabulary. Voice reading uses two types of memory, visual and auditory. This association favored learning, and the girls then retain new or complex words more easily. I am looking forward to continuing and expanding the Great Girls Read campaign next school year!