Cycling to school on time
Attending all the lessons and no longer arriving late motivate Moussamadi and her friends to continue their studies in middle school.
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Moussamadi is 17 years old. She is in grade 9 of the second cycle of basic education in Manantali, a small town on the Bafing River in southwest Mali. The town is famous for its dam, which supplies electricity to the whole region, as well as to Senegal and Mauritania. With her family—her mother, father and siblings — Moussamadi lives in a village 5 km outside of the town. She prefers science classes, especially "Physics and chemistry lessons and formulas are easy to memorize. You just must understand the sequence, and that's it!"
When she was in the first cycle, Moussamadi had to join a group with the village children to walk every school day to get to school, and then return the same way, on foot. "We had to wait for the canoe until 7 a.m. to cross the river. We'd arrive late and the teacher had already started the class. It was hard to miss part of the lesson. The teacher can't redo the lesson for just one student who arrived late. Now, with the bike, I'm no longer late and I'm more motivated," says Moussamadi.
Nowadays, Moussamadi cycles between her home and school. She's more independent: "I can leave and arrive on time, even if the detour via the dam is longer. I can even go home and come back for the break between 12 Noon and 3 p.m." Cycling allows girls in the second cycle to travel quickly and safely to attend classes. Indeed, when the children couldn't leave with the walking group from the village, they sometimes had to give up going to class to avoid making the trip alone.
To support girls who decide to continue their schooling and transition to the second cycle of basic education, UNICEF, in collaboration with its partner NGO Fandeema, which means "help yourself" in Soninke, the local language, has equipped Moussamadi, in blue, Néné, in black, and Sadio, in green, with bicycles. All three live in villages outside the city. The second cycle programme has a more demanding timetable, as students have classes in the morning and afternoon. On weekends and after school, they also use their bikes to run light errands between the market and home, to help their parents and siblings.
While Néné and Sadio already knew how to ride a bike when they received theirs, Moussamadi had never ridden a bike before. "My little brother knew how to ride a bike. He helped me learn” she explains. At first, it seemed complicated, but soon enough she found her balance. The whole family works hard to keep Moussamadi in school. "When my bike broke down, it was my dad who fixed it.” she said. Keeping girls in school to complete their compulsory education, up to grade 9, is essential for them to fully contribute to the development of their community and country.
In Mali, 18.3% of children were still out of school in 2023. Thanks to the efforts made in recent years by all education stakeholders, almost as many girls (55.1%) as boys (56.2%) who enrolled in school completed primary education in 2023. However, the completion rate drops to 32.6% for girls and 33.2% for boys in lower Secondary, which is part of compulsory education. In the Kayes region, where the young girls live, the rate is below the national average. There is still almost a 9 points gap between girls (21%) who complete compulsory education and their male peers (30%).
The gap is even greater in rural areas, where girls are more likely to be exposed to early marriage and pregnancy. The Manantali girls have a friend who studied at primary school with them but had to drop out of school because she became pregnant.
Moussamadi, Néné and Sadio are among the 294 girls in the second cycle of basic education in the Kayes Region who travel more than 3km to get to school and who have received a bicycle through the "Improving Access to Quality Education for Children in the Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali & Niger)" project, funded by NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.
