Empowering Women
	A UNESCO-backed project helps women in Malian villages take charge of their lives

Gori Gopela is over 500 km from the Malian capital of Bamako. In another world, in fact. The people of this little village, 25 km north of Kayes in the country’s remotest area, till the soil and raise animals.

But over the last five years, it has also been the centre of an experimental literacy project. The women, most of whom have never been to school, have been taught to read and write their language, Khassonké. They have also taken part in projects to make them more economically independent.

These changes have been brought to Gori Gopela by the $950,000 UNESCO-Mali project, funded by the Norwegian government. The project has brought the women of the village into a single association.
“Our husbands had never thought of that and now we’re strong,” says the association’s president, Sindy Kanté. “We’ve put together a stock of seeds, the only one in the village, and we now grow vegetables over more than two hectares.”

These operations are run collectively, overseen by officials elected by the literacy centre, who turn out to be the keenest of its pupils. A total of 42 volunteers have been trained this way. “Thanks to this,” says Fodé Boubou Konate, who runs the Stop-Sahel project, “these women have understood the importance of going to health centres. They have also learned dye techniques, how to keep accounts, and how to process local fruit and vegetables.”

Armed with their reading and writing skills, the women of the village are now much less opposed to the idea that their daughters should drop their duties around the home to go to school. In 1996, before the project started, just over 100 children attended the village’s only school. Now there are 420, including 150 girls, attending classes every day.

Dafa Kamissoko became a symbol of this success when this June she became the first girl in the village to get a baccalaureate (graduation certificate).
But resistance to the project remains and some cultural traditions, such as very early marriages, die hard and sometimes get in the way of efforts to push the education of girls.

Gori Gopela is not the only village getting this kind of help. Thirty-five others in the region are covered by the project. A similar programme has also started in the central region of Mopti with the same goal of boosting social and economic development there by educating women.

The Gori Gopela experiment has been publicized through radio and television and could provide lessons for the future. This is the hope of women in neighbouring villages who have not yet been touched by the project.

Contact: Yao Ydo, UNESCO Bamako
E-mail: y.ydo@unesco.org