Timbuktu’s Diary, a Literacy Development Project

I. Background

Project name: Timbuktu’s Diary - Reading, Listening, Talking and Writing: Literacy Training for Rural Women in Mali.

Project brief description: This post-literacy project would take place in semi-rural communities close to the historic city of Timbuktu, capital city of Timbuktu, the Sahel and Sub-Saharan region of Mali (northeast part of the country). Through a group of literacy activities, a one-year diary with texts from women of Mali’s Timbuktu region would be created, published and sold throughout the country.

The funds would be invested in the educational field, whether in similar projects implemented in other regions of the country, in materials for the different communities, or in school related expenses that families cannot afford: “Mali’s actual primary school enrollment rate is low, in large part because families are unable to cover the cost of uniforms, books, supplies, and other fees required to attend even public school.”

Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world and has one of the lowest literacy rates amongst the countries in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa . This project targets women in Mali because this group has the lowest enrollment rates, both at the primary school (according to Mali’s country profile provided by the Library of Congress , in 2000-01, 71 % of males and 51 % of females) and secondary school (according to the same source , in the late 1990s 20% for males and 10% for females) levels.

The importance of literacy towards development is explained by UNESCO:

Literacy is a human right, a tool of personal empowerment and a means for social and human development. Educational opportunities depend on literacy.

Literacy is at the heart of basic education for all, and essential for eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, curbing population growth, achieving gender equality and ensuring sustainable development, peace and democracy.

There are good reasons why literacy is at the core of Education for All (EFA). A good quality basic education equips pupils with literacy skills for life and further learning; literate parents are more likely to send their children to school; literate people are better able to access continuing educational opportunities; and literate societies are better geared to meet pressing development challenges.

UNESCO (http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=54369&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html)


II. Goals and Objectives

This project is designed to fulfill the following goals: “(i) retention and stabilization of literacy skills, (ii) continuation of learning beyond initial literacy skills, and (iii) application of this learning for improving several aspects of personal, social and vocational life.” Achieving these goals would lead to improvements in literacy rates, while empowering women and strengthening local collective action, maybe leading to other projects developed by the community alone or actions that would lead to alternative learning activities, capable of taking literacy to areas where there are no schools. This is what development is all about, the capability of a community to act independently towards improving their members’ skills.


III. Structure

In this project, the organization would be the women involved in the project. There isn’t a hierarchy, except for the one decided by the group. This is a group-project that could have the support (minimal) of a local non-profit. However, all the activities should be developed by the community with little or no involvement of the non-profit.

The greatest motivation for this project would be for the women to see their own work published and to help the community in the education arena. The decisions to be made would be in terms of which texts to include in the collection and that selection would be made by the group, according to their own criteria: for example, each woman would have, after a one-year time period, twelve texts, but only one could be published. The other women in the group would form a jury and vote for the best text to be published.

Funding for printing the final diary would be obtained through KIVA (Nirmal introduced me to this NGO during Week 2 of this course and I have heard from a colleague that actually Oprah also talked about it in her show) and payment would be made with sale’s profits.

Activities:

1. Creating and circulating a small size mobile library (not necessarily a car that drives around with books, but it could be a bicycle type of vehicle), to be available on a monthly basis to working mothers and older women. Reading would stimulate women’s creativity while helping to maintain and develop writing skills.
2. Sharing a radio on a weekly basis and writing the titles of the most important news before passing the radio on to another woman. Listening to the radio and having to write down about news that another woman did not hear about (we are assuming there is no radio access in the community or access is scarce) would help to practice writing and promote interaction between members of the group.
3. Writing a monthly text (a letter, a poem, folk tales, description of events or landscape, etc.). The women would get together monthly and discuss writing techniques and ways of improving the texts. One out of the twelve texts would be selected by the other women in the group.

The mobile library and the gathering of the women involved in the project would be crucial for its success and also to develop a network of people working together towards literacy in a country where “[t]he education system is plagued by a lack of schools in rural areas, as well as shortages of teachers and materials.”


IV. Process

In my opinion, learning/social change can only take place if regarded as a process and if performed by the people/communities that recognize and are willing to join efforts towards change (whether it is improvement of quality of life, development of a skill, or fulfillment of certain needs). Micro-level projects and bottom-up approaches tend to be the most adequate ones because they place the emphasis on the community and look at the community as the agent capable of making changes. In the heart of Timbuktu’s Diary project is the people (the concern with gender equity) and a social (educational) issue (illiteracy).

This project would be an attempt to maintain (and increase through maintaining) literacy rates, based on a community project and not on orthodox/formal learning establishments, such as schools that working women in poor countries often and for different reasons cannot continue to attend after a certain age or cannot attend at all. Stimulating the women to think and to talk about books, news and texts written by them, in the context of a group project, would lead to empowering women from the community.