<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:courier,monaco,monospace,sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div><br><h5 class="reporttitle"><span id="TitleV">MALI: Still a long way to go to meet adult literacy targets</span></h5><span class="reportbody" style="text-align: justify;"><span id="Body">BAMAKO,
17 April 2008 (IRIN) - In 2000 the Malian government signed up to UN
Education for All goals to help 50 percent more adults become literate
by 2015, but eight years on still only 30 percent of Malian adults can
read or write, and the government is yet to outline its strategy to
address the problem.<br><br>“We have very low literacy rates in all
languages here in Mali, and we know we need to make much faster
progress,” Oumar Cissé, communications adviser at the Mali Ministry for
Women and Children, told IRIN.<br><br>According to Idrissa Diarra,
education specialist at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Bamako,
literate adults have higher earning power, are more likely to escape
poverty, and to take the education of their children seriously. <br><br>“If
women are illiterate, how can they play a strong role in their
communities, how can they take strong household decisions, and how can
they vote?” he asked. <br><br>Mali is just one of six countries
(alongside Niger, Chad, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Afghanistan) in which
under 40 percent of adults are literate, according to UNICEF. <br><br><span style="font-weight: bold;">Government policy</span><br><br>In
April 2004 the government launched the Decade of Literacy in
Missabougou, a district of Bamako. Recognising slow progress in
increasing literacy rates, it went on to divide its Education Ministry
in two in October 2007, creating a ministry of basic education and
literacy in national languages, and another to address secondary,
superior education and professional training. <br><br>“Creating a
ministry solely responsible for literacy shows the commitment we have
to improving rates,” Souleymane Kone, national director of the Basic
Education, Literacy and Languages Ministry, told IRIN. <br> <br>However,
he said the government had still not recruited all of its
staff-members, let alone developed a national literacy strategy, adding
that he hoped it would be published in a few months. <br><br>The
president has promised to allocate 3 percent of the national education
budget to adult literacy training as part of the strategy.<br><br>Education currently receives 35 percent of the overall government budget.<br><br>But
Oumar Traouré coordinator of the non-governmental organisation Support
for Quality Education (OMAES), which provides literacy training to
adults through schools in Seygou, 130km north of Bamako, told IRIN this
amount will not be enough to significantly boost the figures. “Three
percent of 35 percent is nothing,” he told IRIN. <br><br>He continued:
"But it is better than nothing... at the moment we have no electricity
or teaching materials in our training centres, and we can’t even afford
to pay our teachers, so they end up leaving.”<br><br style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Few teachers</span><br><br>The
lack of literate adults to teach literacy programmes is hampering
success, according to Traouré. Many adult literacy programmes in Malian
schools are governed by school management committees but in the schools
where OMAES works, most of the management committee members are
themselves illiterate.<br><br>In particular, the lack of qualified
female literacy trainers poses problems, according to UNICEF’s Diarra,
because many men are reluctant to send female family members to learn
under male teachers, so women are often forced to drop out of
programmes. <br><br>With this in mind the government is working
closely with organisations such as UNICEF and the UN Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to train female teachers,
many of them school-leavers. <br><br>“They don’t need an advanced
formal qualification - after all, they are only teaching basic language
and numeracy, not how to read the stars,” said Diarra.<br><br>With the
halfway mark for the Education for All target behind them, Cissé hopes
the time-pressure will spark results. “We should start to see major
changes this year,” she said.<br><br>Despite the enormous efforts that
lie ahead, even Traoré believes Mali has some hope of meeting its 2015
targets. “We may get there”, he told IRIN, “but only with lots of
difficulty.”<br><br>aj/cb</span></span><br></div></div><br>
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