“The first challenge is to improve the training of our teachers and then to review our teaching programs so that the education offered to students is adapted to the reality of our country”, said Father Edmond Dembelé, Commissioner for Catholic Education, at the opening of the second National Forum on Catholic Education, September 17 – 21, “Catholic education in Mali today: what are the prospects for safeguarding its identity and remaining at the service of the population?” was the theme of that meeting. The first national forum to review of the development of Catholic schools in Mali was held in 2013.
Church personnel are working to reconcile links between the many education institutions at the national, diocesan, and local levels in the parishes as well as to sensitize them about the distinctive nature of Catholic education in Mali so as to be able to actively improve and be successful in raising academic standards and tackling unemployment, illiteracy and other social and political issues.
Educational work, a tool for evangelization and development
Recently Mali, a landlocked country in West Africa and the eighth-largest in Africa, approved the draft of the new Constitution that many critics say is tailor-made to provide amnesty for the perpetrators of the coups d’état and keep the junta in power beyond the presidential elections scheduled for February 2024. In August 2020, the military seized power and since then ruled mostly unopposed despite Mali being beset by jihadism and a security, political, and economic crises that has made much of the north and east ungovernable.
The Catholic Church runs 138 education institutions with more than 40,000 students in the Muslim-majority country that has 2.8% Christians among its 21.35 million people. These Church-run institutions include three colleges and universities, five technical institutes and vocational schools, 23 kindergartens and 102 primary schools. There is also a private Catholic education section in Mali that employs 1,645 teachers.
The first Catholic schools were established in Mali in 1889 by missionaries who arrived there a year earlier and who saw educational work as a tool for evangelization and development. In 1960, the Malian state formally acknowledged the Catholic Church’s involvement in education and in an agreement between the State and the Church, the state promised to subsidize Catholic education in order to assist the Church in paying the wages of its instructors. This arrangement is still in force despite Islam being the main religion in Mali and madrassas increasingly popular.
Source: LaCroix
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