by Adama Traore, Teacher Project Manager

In Mali, only 1 in three girls will be able to finish middle school. Many pressures drive girls away from school – from child marriage to economic needs to outdated beliefs about a woman’s role. Our Girls’ Project works to address the range of pressures on girls but my small part is to work with boys throughout the school year to help them understand how they can help change things – how they can speak up for their sisters and female classmates.

This month, I’ve been doing my last meetings of the school year with boys and it has been wonderful to see how their attitude toward girls’ education has evolved. For example, I recently talked with thirty-two boys at  Ross and Marilou Moser Middle School about girls’ education.

During our meeting, we talked about topics that help boys understand better the importance of girls’ education and how to support girls at school and home. The boys really had learned a lot about the challenges girls face : from parents who neglect to pay their school fees to the fear of violence girls may encounter on their trips to school each day.  

This boy you see pictured above in the yellow t-shirt in the front row (right) is Mamadou C. He is 14 and is in the 9th grade. He is very determined to support his female classmates by giving rides on his bicycle to school. I told him this was a wonderfully practical idea for helping girls get to school safely ! He also says he has started discussing the importance of girls’ education with his parents in order to convince them to send more girls to school.  Here’s more from Mamadou :

“I am very excited to be at this meeting as always because I know this meeting could be helpful to many of my male classmates. In my village here many parents do not think girls need as good education as boys since they think girls are intended to go to someone else ‘s family after they got married. This mentality is very popular in my village but I am totally against it because I want my daughters to be educated when I grow up and have daughters.

I think all our parents in this village of Nienguecoro must change their mindset regarding the girls’ education too. There are some educated girls from my village who could even be great examples for everyone but parents still have hard time understanding how girls’ education could help them change their lives and parents lives too.

When I grow up I will marry an educated girl in order to make my life easier. When I say my life easier, I mean having an educated girl as wife can be very helpful to her husband ! My educated wife wouldn’t have any problem while reading prescriptions, she would be able to read signs in big towns, she would be able to help my children do their homework sometimes.

Better than all that, she could have a great job and help me with family expenses. For example when someone gets sick and I do not have money she could help too. My future educated wife could also help me build a nice house, buy a car and do many other good things for our family. This meeting is useful to me and I am sure it is the same thing to almost all my male classmates because most of them are thinking the same way as me but just do not have courage to speak up with parents sometimes because of the cultural beliefs.

I am very thankful to Mali Rising Foundation for helping us know more about the importance of girls’ education.”