By Merritt Frey, Executive Director
We are SO excited! Thanks to our amazing donors, we are delivering nearly 6,000 much-needed textbooks to our schools this month. Imagine learning a foreign language without access to a textbook….could you do it? Well, now our students don’t have to!
Last fall, the Norris Family made a generous donation to purchase enough French books to allow every single child in a Mali Rising school to work from their own textbook. That gift was matched by the Johnson Family and other donors as part of our annual Days of Giving event. This mean that we were able to provide every student with a French book AND an English textbook. Wow!
Two girls at the Harman Family School in Tentoubougou show off just two of the 6,000 textbooks Mali Rising donors sent to our schools.
In Mali, many schools have ZERO textbooks. At best, often 3 to 5 kids are sharing one book during their lessons. When I started at Mali Rising, this was the case in our schools — some schools had literally zero textbooks while even the best textbooks stocks left multiple kids sharing. As you can imagine, this really limits learning in the classroom!
With this huge donation, we were able to analyze each school’s textbook inventory and calculate the number needed to get the school to a one student to one book ratio. We are delivering 2,691 French textbooks, 3,088 English textbooks, and 199 special textbooks for our two primary schools in language arts.
On the advice of our teachers, we prioritized French textbooks because 1) all classes are taught in French, but students speak local languages at home — so if students don’t learn French all of their studies suffer and 2) without textbooks, teachers must write enter lessons out on the chalkboard, wait for students to copy the lesson down, and only THEN can they start teaching — wasting critical classroom time. English textbooks were the second priority because teachers face issue #2 above in just the same manner.
Students and teachers alike are overjoyed with their new textbooks! Just check out some of the photos below for the evidence! Thank you to the Norris Family, the Johnson Family, and all of our Days of Giving book donors for making this possible
