Mali and the Tandana Foundation

Here's some background information on the geography of Mali.

Learn more - here's a  great article  about Mali & its culture!

Tandana partners with many communities in Bandiagara District, in Mopti Region of central Mali. Each of Tandana's projects serves a number of villages, displayed below.

Using the Oxfam Savings for Change model, women form savings groups that meet weekly. Each week, the members of the group each put an amount of money they have decided upon into the group fund. Soon, they have built up enough money that they can make loans to the members of the group to help them start or expand micro-businesses. They repay these loans with interest set by the group. The groups make their own rules, and members memorize both the rules and the amounts of money out in credit and in their funds. At the end of the year, they share their group fund by dividing it evenly among all members. Then they start to save again. Thousands of women in Bandiagara District have benefited from this program, thanks to Tandana's programs and those of its partner, Vital Edge Aid. Villages marked on the map in pink have started Savings for Change groups with Tandana. Those marked in green have started Savings for Change groups with Vital Edge.

To more effectively run their micro-businesses and negotiate in the marketplace, women in Wadouba Township expressed that they wanted to learn basic literacy and numeracy skills. With help from  Vital Edge Aid , Tandana created the first literacy and numeracy booklets in the Tommo So language and began classes. Each year, we now offer these classes for 300 women in 10 class groups.  Each group studies for several hours every day during nine months of classes.

The students are finding all kind of benefits from these studies, including being able to buy and sell without being cheated, being able to count and keep track of their menstrual cycles to better space pregnancies, and being able to use telephones. They are proud to do these things with their own knowledge and not to have to ask for help. 

Each class of students then selects 8-10 leaders to attend workshops on forming and leading women's associations. The leaders share their experiences, learn about association life and return home to create official groups that can request funding from the government and other sources for their income generating projects.

Women’s associations formed through the Women’s Literacy and Leadership program are invited to submit business proposals to a contest. A committee selects the best proposals for income-generating enterprises from these new associations, and the winners receive startup funding for their enterprises, which have included making néré condiment balls, raising sheep, transforming cotton, growing onions, and indigo dyeing.

In Wadouba Township of Mali, deforestation and desertification are serious problems that affect residents' well-being, contributing to food insecurity and causing increasing needs for new water resources. Twenty-four villages have come together and created an association, Olouguelemo, to protect their environment and work cooperatively to restore it. In Mali, such formal organizations allow community members more respect in their communities, greater access to community decision making processes, and more support from the government, both financial and technical. Tandana strives to help this village-run association to be as effective as possible in achieving its goals. The Association designated protected forest areas in each village, where wood-cutting is not allowed, and they patrol to make sure these rules are followed. Olouguelemo also organizes training and support for farmers who want to assist the natural regeneration of trees in their fields, a practice (ANR) that halts deforestation and improves soil stability and fertility. By pruning trees properly, farmers can encourage them to grow up instead of out, so that their roots can prevent erosion and their leaves can add nutrients to the soil, without their branches blocking too much light from the crops. Over time, prunings from the encouraged trees can fulfill firewood needs. Olouguelemo's next initiative was to start the local production and distribution of efficient cookstoves, to decrease the need for firewood that motivates cutting of trees. They organized a training session for representatives from each of the member villages, who learned how to make two kinds of cookstoves and are now fabricating those stoves for sale in their villages. Then, they created tree nurseries to produce native plants as well as fruit trees, medicinal trees, and many other species. These trees are used for reforestation work by the association in the protected forest zones and are also for sale to individual farmers who want to plant them in their fields. Each year they hold a reforestation campaign which has garnered local government support, planting thousands of trees in the Township. Another important initiative of Olouguelemo is erosion control. Representatives from each village learned how to build stone contour lines, which prevent erosion and increase water retention in fields. Then they each taught other farmers in their villages the same techniques. These features have led to greatly improved harvests. The Association also creates and expands stock ponds that provide water for livestock belonging to residents of many of the member villages. In providing a place for animals to water and feed away from the protected forests, these ponds also prevent damage to the forests.

In Mali, Tandana worked with our partner communities, who have no access to running water and limited access to public health information, to limit the spread of COVID-19. Our team did hundreds of education sessions on preventing the spread of coronavirus and distributed dozens of hand wash stations to make it more practical to follow health guidelines. We also supported a hospital and local health centers with supplies they need to care for their patients. Together, we:

• Installed 90 large hand wash stations in public places
• Provided supplies and PPE for 5 health centers and the local hospital
• Hosted 530 education sessions in 82 villages on preventing the spread of the virus
• Provided 570 small hand wash setups for women's associations, families, and other groups
• Distributed 3,026 masks
• Produced and broadcast two radio programs about preventing the spread of COVID-19

Many schools in Mali want to create school gardens. These gardens serve many purposes, including providing hands-on educational opportunities, improving school lunches, and allowing students to sell extra produce to earn money for school supplies. Each garden is led by a committee of students, teachers, and parents. They participate in training sesions to learn how to manage both the garden and its fund well, plant fruit trees and vegetables, harvest, and use some produce for feeding the students while selling extra produce and using the income to purchase supplies.

Water resources are in tremendous demand in the arid Sahel, including Mali's Bandiagara District. Decreasing rainfall and desertification make water rarer and more valued every decade. Most community members draw water by hand from deep wells for drinking and household use. The depth of the water can vary from 1 to 25 meters, depending on the location, the time of year, and the amount of rainfall received that year. During the brief rainy season, from June to August, the water table rises, and then it falls during the rest of the year. Many villages use wells they have dug by hand and place logs over the opening to stand on while drawing water. These wells can collapse dangerously, sometimes livestock or even people fall into them, and the wood must be replaced every year from extremely scarce tree resources. If they are not deep enough, wells may go dry late in the dry season. Also, when the rains begin, storm runoff washes debris into them, polluting the water, if the opening is not raised and protected. Tandana collaborates with villages both on digging new wells and on improving traditional wells so they are safe, clean, and provide water year-round.

Residents of rural Bandiagara District live mostly by subsistence farming of millet and peanuts. Yet with the decreasing rainfall in recent years, they are having a hard time growing enough food to last until the next harvest. To respond to the problem of food security in the region, many communities decide to start grain banks. The Tandana Foundation helps with materials for the storehouse and stocks the bank the first year with a large supply of millet and rice. This grain is sold throughout the year at a constant price, much less than the sky-high levels the market price reaches during the rainy season. Proceeds from each year's sales are used to purchase more grain immediately after the next harvest at the annual low price. Thus, a revolving stock of grain is available for purchase in the village at an affordable price. As families run out of food, they are able to buy it little by little.

Many women in Bandiagara District buy raw cotton grown in other parts of Mali and transform it to earn income. They pick out the seeds, card, and spin it, then hire men to weave it into strips of cloth. Then, they sew the strips together into wider cloths and sell it to a neighboring village for indigo dying. Tired of sporadic availability in the nearby market, exorbitant prices and credit policies, and vagaries in quality, women’s groups in some villages decide to create their own cotton banks in their villages. With the help of The Tandana Foundation, they purchase a large stock of cotton and create a committee to manage it. After receiving training in how to manage the stock and keep records, the committee divides the stock among all the women in the village who want to work with cotton, noting how much each woman will owe for the cotton once she had sold the cloth made from it. After selling their cloth, they pay for the cotton, and the management committee uses the fund to restock for the next year.

Women in Ondougou Township, Mali dye cloth with indigo as their major business, which is reserved for women of a particular heritage. They wanted to have more access to the materials they use in the dyeing process and the ability to purchase them on credit. Tandana helped them create an indigo bank to manage a revolving fund for the materials they use, similar to the cotton banks in other villages. We also provided training for them in additional dyeing techniques to help them keep traditional indigo-dyeing competitive with the more dangerous chemical dyeing-processes that are becoming popular in the region and to do their dyeing safely. They chose a committee of seven women to manage the bank, and the committee member received training in management and record-keeping.

This initial indigo bank grew so much that it was divided into 3 banks for 3 member villages.  Similar indigo banks have also been created in several other villages. 

Tandana also collaborates with specific villages on other initiatives that they propose. One of the biggest of these was the construction and furnishing of a new health center in the Sal Sector, which serves about 9,000 residents who previously had to travel long distances over rough tracks to access health care. The residents of Sal worked hard alongside the skilled masons on construction, and then we equipped it with furniture and stocked it with supplies. It even has an ambulance, thanks to Vital Edge Aid. Local staff are now caring for patients in this new center. The young men of Kansongo are always looking for new businesses to start and ways to generate income. After a Tandana volunteer donated some carpentry tools to the village tool supply, some of the young men decided they wanted to start a carpentry business. Tandana hired a master carpenter from the nearest city to teach them the skills they needed to make furniture, windows, and doors. They also learned how to install metal roofing, which is more and more in demand in the region, since deforestation has made wood difficult to come by. Free-standing blackboards are another product they learned to create, and which they make for Tandana's literacy classes. The village of Kansongho wanted to plant trees, both to create an orchard that would bear fruit, and to reforest the area around the village's original well, restoring it to its historical lushness. The community members and visiting Tandana volunteers planted 300 fruit and native trees inside the orchard. Groups of young men organized to take turns watering the trees. A committee has formed to take responsibility for the orchard and its members have learned how to care for the trees, prune, avoid and treat for pests, and transplant. The young trees have already produced papayas, pomegranates, custard apples, and other fruits, which the tree committee sells at an affordable price, making these fruits available for the first time ever in the village. With the extra care and attention, an old mango tree that had not borne fruit in many years is also producing again. Rural elementary schools in Mali often lack not only equipment, but also sufficient faculty. Sometimes only one teacher is responsible for dozens of students in kindergarten through sixth grade. Thus schools have asked us for assistance in supporting additional local teachers, who are paid partly by the parents’ association and partly by Tandana. We support teachers in Yarou Plateau and Andjine.

Schools also often lack furniture. Without desks, students sit on stones and planks for class. Tandana sometimes supplies furniture, made by the Kansongo carpenters, to improve the educational experience. We have provided furniture to the schools in Sal Ogol and Andjine.

Residents of Kansongo constructed a classroom for their kindergarten using materials provided by Tandana. This is a wonderful addition to their community and a great space for youngsters to learn. Tandana offers rural Malian students support for professional training through a scholarship program, which was started with a generous gift from Dr. Ash B. Varma, M.D. This program helps students from rural Mali learn professions that are very needed in the rural communities, such as health professions and agrofrestry. The scholarship covers 50% of a student’s costs for a year, while the student and their family cover the other 50%. These scholarships not only allow students to access a better future but also help the communities find trained professionals to serve their area. In exchange for Tandana's support, scholarship recipients engage in community service to share their new skills and knowledge for the betterment of their communities. The student mothers program supports girls from rural villages who are living in the town of Bandiagara so they can attend middle school. They have to find families to host them, and if they get pregnant, the families usually send them back to their villages and they have to drop out of school. This program provides training for the families to explain that they can still host the students even if they are young mothers. It also provides food and basic medical supplies for the babies, so they are not an extra cost to the families. It helps girls stay in school despite the challenges of motherhood. We are currently building a menstrual kit workshop in Bandiagara. Menstruation is surrounded by taboos in Mali, and hygienic menstrual supplies are often difficult to access. There are many women who want to buy sanitary, sustainable menstrual kits. To make the kits available in a sustainable way and also create employment opportunities, we are creating a workshop where these kits can be made locally.

Click the map to the right to view oral history descriptions of 10 villages, collected by Tandana.