Everyone can agree: sometimes it is your friends who get you through the touch stuff….and middle school is REALLY tough stuff. Two girls in the Girls’ Project demonstrate this truth perfectly! Fatoumata and Tenin have been inseparable friends since primary school. Today, both girls are 13 years old and attend the 8th grade in Little Heroes Academy I school in Mana.
Judge, Pediatrician, & More: Girls Dream Big
Skits Use Humor to Broach Tough Topics
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.
Boys Speak Out for Girls
Girls’ education is a challenging subject everywhere in Mali. But it is especially problematic in rural areas, like those where our schools are located. Many parents in Mali do not think that a girl’s education is as valuable as a boy’s. Parents’ attitudes towards girls’ education are also passed down to their sons. As a step toward breaking that cycle, we host discussions with boys at our schools about girls’ education as a human right and as an issue that improves everyone’s future — boys, girls, families, and communities.
Female Role Models Inspire Girls
In January, we brought three women from different careers to talk with Girls’ Project girls about their educational and professional backgrounds and the importance of a girl's education. he speakers included a policewoman, an electrician and a firefighter. The visit of three women allowed the girls to to motivate themselves, to be courageous and to know the different functions that women can exercise. The speakers not only talked about their time in school, but also their journey to finding work as a woman. The women stressed the journey to show the girls that magic didn't get them where they are today!
Independence, Sustainability, & Safe Schools
Are you a skilled DIYer? What if you had to do the repairs at your kid’s school….would your skills hold up for that DIY job? Maybe not, but if you had a little help maybe you could feel good about contributing back to the school. That’s what our school maintenance trainings do for parents on our partner schools’ School Management Committeees.
New Villages for a New Year of the Girls' project
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.
Textbooks: Tools We Take for Granted
As one of my former professors —Pr Ibrahim Sagayar — said: “A teacher or a student without a textbook is like a soldier on the battlefield without a weapon”. Yet all too often in Mali, teachers and students are not armed with textbooks. I recently discussed this problem with two of our partner principals — the principal of Sue Chung Chiu Middle School of Simidji, Mr. Essai Mikoro and the principal of Little Heroes Academy I Middle School of Mana, Mlle. Djenebou Niama Coulibaly.
Aminata Becomes a Clean Hands Expert!
The Little Heroes Academy I Middle School of Mana has more than one hundred students. The school has many challenges to address. One of the main challenges is how to keep kids healthy and be able to attend school. Mali Rising is doing our small part to help with that challenge, by providing hygiene education classes. One student, Aminata, really took the lesson to heart!
New Learning Kits Enliven the Classroom
Because basic tools such as textbooks, maps, educational diagrams, or science materials are missing from Mali classrooms, teachers are really limited in how they can prepare and deliver their lessons. But Mali Rising Foundation has long worked to provide textbooks to our classrooms, but this year we added additional tools provided in kits we loan out to schools for two weeks at a time. We provide two types of Learning Kits to our schools – a Language Kit and a Science Kit. The Language Kit provides resources for teaching both French and English, including books, flashcards, and more. The Science Kit is packed full of scientific drawings, tools for active learning like magnifying glasses and rulers, and other tools. We also provided written instruction sheets that give the teachers multiple ideas about how they can easily incorporate the Kit tools into their lessons.
