This is the story of a parent, recorded during a general assembly meeting in Sevaré of the Mopti region, and in a village known as Batouma, during the Bɛɛkunko 2016 evaluation:
Village Assembly in Batouma, Mopti, Mali
“One day, I received an invitation from an NGO. To be able to understand its content, I called my daughter who is currently in her 6th year of level 3 in school. She was unable to read the content of this invitation, which only stated the name, date and place of the meeting. What a disappointment for me! I got very upset, saddened and frustrated at having sacrificed so much for my daughter’s education, only to get such upsetting results. This disappointment caused me to have no desire whatsoever to meet with the teachers in the village because I believed the teachers do not do any work.”
However, and at the end of the discussions at the general assembly meeting, the father in question humbly realised that he too had not played his role of monitoring and supporting his daughter, in order to improve on her learning.
This assembly meeting with the communities, made it possible for parents to diagnose the quality of education their children were receiving, and to enable them understand their own responsibility in improving on learning done in school.
Bɛɛkunko, a member of the PAL Network, is an independent mechanism for the assessment of learning in Mali. Bɛɛkunko’ means ‘the concern of everyone’ in Bamanakan and is a program of L’œuvre Malienne d’Aide à l’Enfance du Sahel (OMAES), a non-profit organization in Mali.