Education for pastoralists
Pastoralist schools in Mali: gendered roles and curriculum realities
Using female community mobilisers to increase gender equity in education in Mali
Authors:
S. Sanou; S. Aikman
Publisher:
Oxfam, 2005
In the pastoral communities of Gao in northern Mali, girls’ school attendance is as low as 30 per cent, and non-completion rates for primary education are very high. In partnership with local organisations, Oxfam has worked with animatrices – female community mobilisers – who support girls’ access to education and foster their participation through complementary developments designed to make the curriculum more gender-equitable. This chapter from "Beyond Access: Transforming Policy and Practice for Gender Equality in Education" examines the role of animatrices in the Oxfam programme.
Drawing primarily on unpublished reviews and evaluations and interviews with key NGO staff, the report finds that the work of the animatrices has been successful in increasing the access and retention of children, and especially of girls, in school. However, recent evaluations suggest that the animatrices do not challenge conventional assumptions about roles for women and girls and may even have increased women’s workload. Animatrices (and teachers) are also not sufficiently engaged with questions about the quality of the education that girls are receiving, or what girls can do with their learning and skills in the wider social environment in which they live.
The authors recommend consideration of ways in which the animatrice model can be supported to become more challenging and transformative. They suggest that the animatrices need to promote understanding and commitment to girls’ rights to a good-quality education which challenges pastoralists’ patriarchal gender relations and those of the wider Malian society.
More generally, they argue that:
- there is also a need for more questions to be asked about what education for all means in terms of classroom relations, learning and teaching practices, and curriculum content
- gender inequalities need to be tackled through several different interventions and a diversity of approaches simultaneously: inside and outside the school, at both the local and national levels
- changes in national legal frameworks and institutional organisation – such as decentralisation and education reforms – also need to be part of gendered processes
- the active engagement of girls and women in their own schooling, promoted by the animatrices, is an important starting point for bringing about change.
