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Preschool Education
The project to improve nursery education is a financed by the Stromme Fondation in partnership with Jeunesse et Développement. It grew out of research in three of Bamako's communes in 2003 that sought to identify organisations offering preschool education. The study revealed the numersous risks that young children are habitually exposed to, including poor parents inability to pay nursery enrolment fees for their children, lack of training for preschool educators, lack of appropriate equipment and non compliance with accepted norms for preschool education, to name but a few.

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Extracts from the 2007 Evaluation:

The project is pertinent in more than name. Parents of children living on the outskirts of the city live from day to day, surving without any real qualfications. Children are virtually abandonned to fend for themselves while their parents look for the money that the family will use to survive for the day ahead and very young children can be left to roam the streets, sometimes exposed to all kinds of dangers (traffic accidents, open drainage ditches and even kidnapping). The project arrived and has been able to protect a lot of children from risks encountered due to lack of supervision.

children on a slide

children seated in a well equiped classroom

Parents talk about the advantages of the nurseries including their observations that:

  • their children are more alert and observant than before and seem more at ease and self confident
  • children hardly get lost at all any more;
  • their children are safe and well looked after by the school staff;
  • mohers are more free to concentrate on their daily activities;
  • children show more respect;
  • they meet each other outside nursery and have a social group of friends;
  • they are cleaner because of the hygiene lessons they learn in school;
  • children from nursery schools have an easier transition to primary school.
From the results that have been noticed, it is clear that the initiative is having a significant impact on children's lives. Teachers from primary schools that have enrolled children from the nurseries that are part of the J&D programme confirm that they are more ready for school than others. The process of integration into the school environment is easier; they already know how to count, how to recite some verses and are quicker to draw and hold a pencil than children from other local nurseries or those who have no nursery experience. While current funding comes to end in 2008 it is to be hoped that new partnerships will enable the programme to continue so that it can cover more schools and develop its work to take into account the recommendations of the evaluation.

children playing with plastic bricks