Mali has been facing a security crisis since 2012. A peace agreement was signed between the government and two rebel coalitions in 2015, but violence continued to escalate and social unrest led to a coup d’état in 2020.

In early 2020, 12% of schools were closed due to conflict and insecurity, disrupting the education of 338,700 students, primarily in the central and northern regions of the country.

More recently, there has been an improvement in security conditions, leading to the return of some refugees and internally displaced persons, and schools are gradually reopening. However, the children in these areas face multiple challenges.

The distribution of school kits is one incentive to help students continue their education even in places where education was severely disrupted.

The kits also provide much-needed supplies to schools and communities that are struggling with a lack of resources.

Transporting the school kits

Getting the school supplies to the large number of students in need is a complex logistical operation.

Hundreds of packages of bags, notebooks, stationery and other materials, such as math compasses, are kept in a storage room in the capital city of Bamako. From there, administrative staff from the education ministry sort and pack the kits, ensuring each child receives the same set of supplies.

The kits are then loaded onto trucks for delivery to the conflict-affected regions, where education offices help facilitate the distribution of supplies to schools within their district.

Delivering supplies to schools in remote regions such as Timbuktu poses significant challenges, and even areas like Banamba, situated in the Koulikoro region adjacent to Bamako, encounter difficulties. Banamba has experienced sporadic school closures due to security concerns in the past.

Banamba city, which experienced an attack in 2016 where armed groups broke into the main prison of the city to free multiple detainees, still grapples with insecurity on the main roads that lead to the city.

In December 2023, three schools in the district were closed by armed groups. In such a context, educational kits containing essential learning materials help students continue their studies even in times of crisis.

In this case, the truck delivered kits to the Koulikoro Teaching Academy, about 60 kilometers northeast of Bamako, where delegates from Banamba district communities met to collect the supplies for their respective schools.

They loaded boxes onto their motorbikes and made the 90-kilometer drive to the Banamba district. As is traditional in the Malian culture, the kits were presented to school officials as an honor, before the final journey toward the schools.

Delivering the school kits

Keeping education going when schools close

A GPE grant of $45.7 million for the period 2021-2027, managed by the World Bank, is helping Mali’s Ministry of Education continue service delivery in this time of crisis and improve the resilience of the education system.

These school kits play an important role in supporting children to continue learning during times of conflict. In parallel, the Ministry of Education is producing digital content for remote learning programs aimed at education continuity and training teachers in distance learning methods.

Teachers are also being trained to provide accelerated programs to mitigate learning loss due to school closure.