Communes and Context

Since the beginning of 2012, Mali has been struggling with an armed conflict in the central and northern parts of the country. The war exacerbated poverty and precipitated the country into political turmoil. Ten years later, the nation is confronted to a multi-dimensional crisis with recurring droughts, frequent workers’ strikes, COVID 19 and international sanctions that had a disastrous impact on the nation’s economic and human development. Mali’s progress on poverty reduction has stalled and the education sector is suffering from frequent school closures, damaged infrastructure, teachers’ absenteeism, and lack of educational materials. Young people living in conflict zones are particularly affected. It is within that context that the project Participatory Research on Education and Agency in Mali (PREAM) was initiated.

PREAM seeks to investigate the relationship between agency and educational participation in conflict-affected regions of Mali. Conducted over three years in Segou and Mopti regions in Mali, the project draws on a collaboration between Ï㽶ÊÓƵ and the Université des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Bamako (ULSHB) in close collaboration with Plan International Canada and Plan International Mali.

Participant Selection

The initial PVM workshop were held with five groups of adolescents (aged 13 to 18 years), including out-of-school adolescents and students from two primary schools and non-formal schools. Data collection took place in Ségou and Mopti, Mali.

• The adolescent workshops included the participation of both girls and boys, in sex-separated groups. Given the heightened vulnerability of girls and their more limited access to education — trends that are both amplified during conflict — this research focused on the relationship of girls’ agency and educational participation. It also examined the relationship as experienced by boys, both to provide a contrast and comparison that highlight the gendered nature and differences between girls’ and boys’ experiences, as well as to verify or potentially challenge the assumptions of gender inequality in relation to agency and education participation and outcomes in conflict-affected contexts.
• This relationship between gender and education was examined with students from both formal and non-formal primary schools (e.g. ‘catch-up’ learning centres) to examine the degree to which the type of education offered serves to have an influence (positive or negative) on girls’ agency.
• It also consulted girls and boys who are out of school to identify the degree that constraints on their agency contributed to their absence from school, and whether they are able to access other forms of learning.

Participtory Visual Methodology

The initial PVM workshop were held with five groups of adolescents (10f/10m in each). Each workshop used a combination of PVM, including Cellphilms (MacEntee, Burkholder & Schwab-Cartas, 2016), and Draw-Write-Narrate (Ogina & Nieuwenhuis, 2016). As previous PVM research with youth highlights, art offers rich representations on how participants see these issues, also stimulating deeper group discussion around emerging themes (Mitchell et al, 2016).  During initial workshops, concepts of agency and education participation were explored to identify the components of these concepts that are most relevant to participants. Based on workshop results, the project’s operational concepts of agency and education participation and data collection instruments were developed for the survey and subsequent workshops.