Education in the Niger Central Delta in Mali: the new vision of the NGO Eveil.

The NGO Eveil is a development operator in the service of the Malian society. It has been working in the Mopti region since 1998. Its main center of interest is the training in citizenship and democratic governance.
Mali stands at the crossroads. After the important sociopolitical changes that marked the 90 decade, now time has come for people to join another vision of development, to claim the improvement of their living conditions. The fight which leads to the change of a society is first ideological. To start an ideological substratum, is to make the communities understand that from their real-life experience, their ideas, their vision, they can change the world. One of Karl Marx’s visions is the practice of what has been interpreted. For me this vision seems to be accurate. Ten years after putting in place a program of civic education and governance in the Delta, we are still struck by the impedimenta that mark the region. The Delta is considered as a conservative country. But the Delta has a specific interpretation of the political, national and local, institutional and social power.
Conscience training breaks mass literacy. Mass literacy is not a synonym of development because whenever literacy is taken as object of a program, it takes end as soon as the program finishes. It’s the same thing for the projects of pastoralism, agriculture, natural resources management, that have been put in place in our country and in the Delta. This form of training was not sufficiently rooted in the daily real-life experience and was not appropriate. The vision of the NGO Eveil means that literacy should go from man and lead to man who is in the center of the training. The project does not develop, it accompanies. We are not on the same wavelength with the method of reading and writing which is limited to a theoretical vision of literacy for the benefit of a method and contents that rely on democratic, legal and institutional substratum. When we teach a citizen how to read, at the same we teach him/her how to know his/her commune, the city, the communal functioning, local power management, the flag, the functions of the President of the Republic, the powers separation, the institutions of the Republic.