By Hindaty Traore, Girls’ Project Manager

Mali Rising’s Girls’ Project strives to get more girls into school and help them succeed and thrive once they are there. In the past six years, we’ve helped girls in eight different villages get into school and stay there. This summer, we are selecting five new villages for intensive work via the Project. We are excited to announce those new villages today.

The Girls’ Project works intensively with villages for three years, establishing a solid footing for girls’ education. With our small staff, we cannot work in all twenty-six of our villages at the same time so we select a group of villages every three years. The first three villages in the  Project were Beneko, Kolimba and Simidji. For the last three years, we  worked in five additional villages --Diorila, Tamala, N'tentou, Zambougou and Sebela.

To select our new Project villages, we explore the urgent problems in each of our partner villages, starting with the number of girls compared to the number of boys enrolled in school. We also explore the number of girls who dropout and evaluate the involvement of parents in the education of girls. Other factors we consider include the willingness of the schools’ principals and teachers to work with us, the location of the school, and more.

Starting in the 22/23 school year, we will partner with the villages of Nienguekoro, Mana, Diorlia, Manabougou, and Sankama.

There are two firsts in this group of villages. First, Diorila represents the first time we will work in a village for more than one cycle of three  years. We decided to do this because although the situation has improved in Diorila over the last three years, it still has the poorest ratio of girls to boys enrollment of all of our schools.

The second “first” is represented by the selection of Manabougou. This will be the first time we work with girls in primary school – focusing on girls in 5th and 6th grade. Our goals are the same – to get more girls into  to school and help them stay there.  Our hope is that we can give these younger girls the passion for education they will need to stay in school not only through primary school but also through middle school.

To this end, to achieve our objective we are going to change some of the activities we do with older middle school girls. Some of these activities will be games on different themes to develop their skills of collaboration, teamwork, and communication. We will also focus on self-esteem and self-confidence. Lastly, we will try to provide some basic life skills for the young girls, such as how to avoid getting malaria and mosquito bites. Because the girls are quite young, we will facilitate the learning of the theme through games and other fun activities.

I can't wait to start the new school year because it will be a new challenge. In the coming year, I’m excited to get to know more than 200 new girls and to see how they grow and blossom as they learn how powerful they are and what a difference an education can make.