Timbuktu’s Diary, a Literacy Development Project

© Ana Mendes e Land

Development is like a ship, and illiteracy an anchor. A ship can only move forward when
the anchor is raised.

A. Gillete, Les jeunes et l’alphabétisation, Paris and New York, UNESCO/CESI, 1973

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.”1

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 Africa2. 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 Congress3, in 2000-01, 71
% of males and 51 % of females) and secondary school (according to the same source4, 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.

1
In: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Mali.pdf
2
Data provided by UNESCO: http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document.aspx?
ReportId=125&IF_Language=eng&BR_Fact=LTRAT&BR_Region=40540,
http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document.aspx?
ReportId=121&IF_Language=eng&BR_Country=4660.
3
In: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Mali.pdf
4
In: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Mali.pdf

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 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.”5 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.
5
In: “Learning Strategies for Post-Literacy and Continuing Education in Mali, Niger, Senegal and Upper
Volta, UNESCO Institute for Education, Federal Republic of Germany, 1984, available at:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0008/000814/081486eo.pdf

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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.”6

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.

6
In: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Mali.pdf