PROCESS OF NATIONALISING COMMUNITY SCHOOLS IN MALI

Abstract

In Mali, community schools are non-profit making schools which aim at acquiring and developing instrumental and professional knowledge. They are created and managed by rural or urban communities or associations. Since 2013, the government of Mali has started the process of transformation of community schools in public schools. That process should have as results, the recruitment of all the community schools’ teachers in the State civil service. Ethnographic fieldwork in some community schools and analysis of recent reports on community schools’ transformation in public school are adopted as the core methodological approach of the study. Findings indicated that still in 2020, more than 2/3 of those community schools remained in their former situation, managed by local communities, having the same problems like the lack of proper premises in urban areas. Though some community schools have been nationalised by the government in order to reduce the charge of local communities in terms of funding and management, still they must continue to pay in order to keep their schools functioning. In addition, to know the level of understanding of communities regarding the importance of community schools, this paper is a contribution making the inventory of the state of progress of the process of nationalisation of community schools in Mali and at the same time, the living conditions of newly nationalised school