educational quality

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Volunteers Needed: You Can't Improve What You Don't Measure!

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By Merritt Frey, Executive Director

How do you measure a great education? You tell us! In 2021, Mali Rising is overhauling our approach to measuring the quality of education in our remote, rural Mali schools. We are searching for 2 to 3 people with skills in education, monitoring, and evaluation to help us really understand how to change lives through education.

Advisors will engage with our board committee (Internal Affairs Committee) on this issue and devote 4 to 6 hours a month to research and discussion. We ask Advisors to commit to 10 months of engagement (March-December) if possible. In exchange, Advisors will get to know a wonderful group of volunteers, explore how education works in a different culture, and have access to special content from Mali and our schools.

Interested in learning more and perhaps getting involved? Contact Merritt.

Classroom full of students.JPG
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Keeping Students Connected to Learning

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Just like everyone else around the world, Mali Rising staff and students have had to make a lot of “pivots” over the last year. Although that term may be over-used these days, it remains a central part of our new reality. Flexibility has become our new core skill, as closed schools and other problems challenge attempts to keep children learning. As part of our pivoting, we have developed and distributed take-home workbooks that allow our students to stay connected with learning and language during their extended break.

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Helping Girls Leap From Primary to Middle School

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One of the Girls’ Project goals is to have more girls graduate from middle school. To achieve that goal, we must first make sure that girls make the leap from 6th grade (primary school) to 7th grade (middle school). As part of our strategies to help girls make that leap, we have been talking to the families of the girls who were in the 6th grade and are now supposed to be enrolled in 7th grade in January 2021. These meetings are focused on trying to convince parents to keep girls in school, but also to see if there are any obstacles that would prevent girls from moving on to 7th grade. In December 2020, we talked with 18 families.

Each family had a different reason why they were considering removing their girls from school. One common issue is that families think that when a girl turns 15 she must be married. This belief makes it much more difficult to convince families to let their daughters continue in school, and perhaps into vocational training to get a job.

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One Girl Leader Steps Into Her Power

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As part of our Girls Project, after three years of work in a village, we train local Girl Leaders to take over leadership of the Project. This allows us to offer leadership training and real-world experience to some amazing young women and to make the Project more sustainable by making the leadership more local. Girl Leaders serve for one year, and we offer them three multi-day trainings throughout their year of service. In this blog post, Hindaty tells the story of one Girl Leader as she attended her second training with us.

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We Need Both Girls & Boys To Change the World

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What do the students themselves think about their education and the education of girls in particular? For a long time Malian children had no idea of the importance of their education. Today with the advent of technology and more discussions about the subject, children are becoming aware of the importance of their education. However, gender equality in education is a subject that still needs more discussion in our villages. Not everyone is convinced that both boys and girls have the right to an education. As part of the Girls Project, I helped lead a debate among the boys from the school in Tamala around the topic of girls' education.

Safety First at Judge Memorial Middle School!

Mr. Touré is a Math teacher at Judge Memorial Middle School of Sankama. He is 34 years old and, according to him, married to a beautiful wife. Mr. Touré does not live with his wife in Sankama where he teaches because it is a small and remote village. He misses his wife incredibly while teaching in village. He gets to see his wife about every two months when he visits her in Bamako, the capital city of Mali, which is about 100 km from the village where he teaches. Mr. Touré has been very concerned about student health in his school since the outbreak of COVID-19. Because of his concern, he volunteered to coach the Mali Rising Health Club at Judge Memorial Middle

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Helping Girls Find the Space & Quiet to Learn

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The Girls Project focuses on enrolling more girls in school, but it also aims to help those girls succeed once they are in the classroom. To help our girls, we organize regular study meetings. This allows girls to learn techniques to better understand their lessons, with a particular focus on what the girls identify as the difficult parts of the subjects. The Study Groups are new for the Girls Project this year. It is in the spirit of creativity that we introduced them into our activities, after finding that the girls have deficiencies in learning their lessons when trying to study after class.

Judge Memorial Middle School’s Health Club Rocks

Sata Culbaly is an 8th-grade student at Judge Memorial Middle School of Sankama. She is a smiling and a very driven girl. Sata is 14 years old and likes school very much because she gets to see her friends in school every day. Sata enjoys being in the school’s Mali Rising Health Club and teaching her classmates the best ways to wash their hands with soap. Sata says that the Health Club in Sankama is a great thing because it inspires students to adopt great habits when it comes to washing hands and greeting without handshakes…

Safety First at Ross and Marilou Moser Middle School

Ross and Marilou Moser Middle School has been changed by the Covid-19 pandemic just like all schools in Mali. Parents and students have been very worried about their village’s future in terms of education and health. School have been closed for months and students were concerned and depressed. When the government decided to reopen schools, the whole village was thrilled to see their kids back in school even though the pandemic was not still over. We are working to help students feel and be safe by setting up a health club so students are more aware of the virus and how to protect themselves and their families.

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