By Hindaty Traore, Girls’ Project Manager

At the end of each school year, Mali Rising’s Girls’ Project organizes celebrations in each Project village. We call these celebrations Feasts and use them to bring the whole village together to learn about and celebrate girls’ education.

One way that we convey awareness messages is through humorous skits. We focus these skits on sensitive subjects that girls face during their education. Feast days are days when the whole village comes together to celebrate and people are happy, so this is an ideal time to sensitize as many people as possible on the importance of girls' education. Topics often include early marriage, school dropouts, the burden of housework limiting girls’ study time, and more.

This year was a fun one for skits. With the help of the girls themselves, in each village we developed a skit specific to the problems in that particular village.

For example, at Little Heroes Academy I in the village of Mana, girls’ dropouts are linked to early pregnancies of girls outside of marriage, the burden of housework and early marriage of girls (one of the very sensitive topics).

In one of the skits in Mana, Fanta D --  student in grade 7 – played the role of me (!)in the skit. She came to the village and gathered the School Management Committee, parents, teachers, and students. She introduced herself saying her name is Ms. Hindaty then she started talking about the importance of a girl's education. One girl played a mother who told Ms. Hindaty that she was wasting her time because her daughters would not go to school. The skit then flashed a few  years into the future.  In that future, those parents who followed Ms. Hindaty's advice and kept their girls in school had daughters who were successful in life. But the mother who insisted school was a waste of time for her daughter was in great difficulty  every day in their home.

In a second example, at Ross and Malilou Moser Middle School in Nieguenkoro, I worked with the girls to develop skits on the importance of  the involvement of parents in the education of girls and on the problem of dropouts who run away to work in the gold mines. We selected these topics because they are the biggest challenges for girls’ education in Nieguenkoro.

These skits allowed us to raise awareness on sensitive topics with humor – easing discussions about the tough topics. In addition, the helped the girls work on their public speaking skills and overcome their fears about speaking up in public.

I also saw that the girls learned a lot by playing their roles -- to see yourself through the eyes of the another character can allow the girls to become aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Playing the role of another can make it possible to feel and measure the effects of a word or a behavior.

For example, playing the role of a girl who only wanted to impress boys and who does not learn her lessons properly can help a girl “live” with the consequences such behavior can have through the skit!

Overall, this year’s skits were very funny and instructive and the messages were very well conveyed…and received.