Unfortunately, they were only paid a 3-month salary, with no promised bonuses. Many had to go into debt to ensure their survival and that of their families.
In August, of course, they began threatening to strike if their 9 months' wages and 12 months' bonuses (higher or lower depending on their distance from the towns) were not paid before the start of the new school year, scheduled for 3.10.2023. Despite the numerous strikes in September and the chronicles in the media, the government continued to ignore the problem, going out of its way to promote the digitization of every teacher with identification to reduce corruption, and to demand preparation for the competitive examination to enter the civil service.
The start of the new school year was limited to the capital, and only to private schools. In the rest of the country, all public schools remained empty, without teachers or pupils.
After several emergency meetings between the authorities and the unions in October, an agreement was reached:
All regional ministries signed the agreement this weekend. We are curious to know if the teachers will come to their posts tomorrow, Monday, to start the 2023-24 school year.
Listen to the first reactions to this agreement by N'Valy Condé, University Professor of Philosophy in Conakry, teacher-researcher and columnist on Djoma television
We sincerely hope that this change will benefit him and that he will be transferred to a good school in Kankan, so that he can end his career close to his family.
We salute the new principal, Mr. Mamadouba Koffiou Camara, Maths, Physics and Chemistry teacher, and hope that together we can continue to improve secondary education in this sub-prefecture.
Officially, in front of the cameras and the entire population, as well as Mr. Souleymane Condé, the elementary school principal, he promised to send as many contract workers as possible to run this new infrastructure, without specifying the number.
In our project application, accepted and subsidized at 75% by the BMZ in 2022, we asked for 6 new teachers, one per classroom, to ensure the schooling of the 380 pupils. This is exactly what Mr. Oumar Traoré, our project manager, summed up in front of the microphones
For the past 2 years, virtually no primary school candidates have passed the collège entrance exam.
We are happy to learn that a new principal has just been assigned to Fodecariah elementary school. He seems to have a lot of ideas on how to raise the level of these children. We look forward to meeting him. We hope he will also receive a minimum of 8 to 10 teachers to enable teaching in classes of no more than 50 children.
This year we're bringing plenty of teaching aids, videos and tools to teach all the measurements of lengths, weights, volumes, time and areas in primary school.
With his contribution, they could set up regular workshops in the nearby Maison des Jeunes, and make learning more tangible, where the children make their own discoveries and experiments.
We sincerely hope that he will motivate the youth of this sub-prefecture to commit themselves for the benefit of the populations and the youth themselves to improve their living environment.
It was our local partners, teachers at the collège, who were also distraught by the deterioration in the level of primary school pupils, who advised us to organize this summer camp, so that our 26 sponsored primary school girls could acquire the basics they need to have a real chance of passing their college entrance exams.
For 2 months, the girls will concentrate on their learning and return to their families only in the evenings. They'll be immersed in the French language, learning alphabet, syllabaries and word formation in small groups in the mornings, followed by fun and educational activities in the afternoons, including running competitions to find the right letters, watching cartoons and then learning to express themselves, following readings of African tales and coloring.
Similar to summer camps, they'll also eat together.
Find out more about how this summer camp works
This extracurricular project includes an octopus created by a Franco-Guinean artist duo, as well as a swing set, a slide, a seesaw, a turnstile and a set of 2 mobile soccer nets.
The playground fencing was made from recycled car tires, painted and cemented to limit the intrusion of pets, who live there in complete freedom, to avoid their droppings.
In addition, our association has set aside a substantial budget for a massive tree-planting project for the playground and courtyard of the new elementary school, to provide shade and fruit.
Sand and cement are provided by the villagers.
The Fasso Demen Dalaba youth association is committed to recovering an old boat and transforming it into a pirate ship to be installed in the playground after the rainy season, for the start of the new school year at the end of September.
To find out more, visit our project report
This school project, comprising 2 buildings with 3 classrooms each, a borehole and a sanitary block with 8 latrines and a septic tank, will enable the village's 387 schoolchildren to pursue a normal education from CP1 to CM2 from the start of the new school year in September 2023.
The special feature of this project is that we have installed a water tower with a 5,000-liter tank, powered by 5 solar panels and a pump, and connected to collective washbasins so that the children can drink drinking water from the tap and wash their hands before going to class and after washing up. This installation complies with WASH and Guinea's SNAPE standards. It ensures drinking water quality so that children suffer less from diseases transmitted by unsafe water.
What's more, grey water will be collected in a lost well that will be used to water the young trees in the courtyard during the dry season, as well as the gardens of families living nearby.
'We Want Free Water' by N´Faly Kouyaté and Tiken Ja Fakoly
To find out more, visit our project report
Our agenda will have as usual a first part reporting on everything that has been done in 2022 in Guinea, in the region of Kankan and in particular in the sub-prefecture of Fodécariah & Balimana.
After a culinary break and exchanges in the garden (if time permits), we will turn to our 2024 objectives in a second part. First we will think together about what kind of "decolonization to development aid" we want to promote, and then we will try to apply them concretely through our small projects of 2024.
To celebrate this anniversary everyone will have a small gift ....
In addition, we will continue to diversify the distributions, as our previous leader had already started. That is to say, to add beans to the bag of local rice also produced in Fodécariah & Balimana.
From the beginning of the new school year, we will add "pois de terre", in partnership with small women producers in Kankan. All this in order to bring more vegetable proteins necessary for the growth of the children.
Conde Mask
Traditional Malinke mask from Upper Guinea, very much alive in the whole sub-prefecture of Fodécariah Balimana and present at all village ceremonies.
It is the whipping father. His role is to punish village infractions and discipline women and children.
He wears a dress of vegetable fibers, a mask of wood and metal, decorated with small mirrors, and carries at least one whip.
Everyone dances with him until he shakes his two whips and everyone runs away.
Then the dance starts again and everyone comes back...
Soli Mask Traditional Malinke mask very colorful composed of felt, mirrors and shells cauri represents the youth and the circumcised initiates.
First, there is a party in the village under the mango trees with the Conde mask, musicians and entertainment for young and old, and then everyone takes their nets and fish traps to go to the pond.
At the kick-off, everyone jumps into the water in the mud and collects as many fish as possible
This party is usually supported by a sponsor who contributes financially to the festivities.
This is why Mr. Doumbouya, a French teacher at the middle school, is committed with a team of volunteers from the middle school and the high school to raise the level of the primary school by offering regular educational activities in the youth center.
This team will support what illiterate parents cannot provide, i.e. tell stories regularly, encourage children to read, organize reading contests, play word-making, classify, play detective to learn to reason and deduce, play shop to learn to calculate.
The "Papis" puppet will be used to translate into Malinké when the children do not understand and lose their footing, and then to motivate the children to overcome their fears to appropriate the contents with their own words.
Moreover, we hope that the parents of the students (APEAE) will get together to contribute financially to organize year-round revision courses with motivated teachers.
This village has only 3 classrooms, a headmistress and 2 temporary teachers, no drinking water wells and broken and unsanitary latrines. Unfortunately I don't have a magic wand!
At this ceremony, I discovered for the first time a woman in the brotherhood of hunters, a musician and singer. As for the masks, they have 2 witches, the witch "Mange Tout" with purple hair and the witch who does not know how to behave in society.
It is responsible for BMZ projects in West Africa. She has been advising us for about ten years and helped us to set up 5 projects. But this was the first time she wanted to visit us to check the state of the infrastructure set up in Fodécariah, as well as the construction site of an elementary school with a sanitary block, underway in Dalaba.
She appreciated the library with its 6000 books and the loan system organized by Mr. Mara, history and geography teacher.
She has of course cross-checked the information about the computer room between the person in charge, Mr. Camara, and its use by the students in an interview with them. She even wanted to turn on a random laptop and see how UBUNTU and Labdoo worked.
Lastly, she visited the construction site of the elementary school in Dalaba (15 km from Fodecariah). She noted with joy that Mr. Bérété, the president of the APEAE of Dalaba, knew how to organize the planning between the contractor Sociac Guinée and the villagers so that the work progresses without delays.
Here is a video report in French of his visit to Djouma, the local television of Kankan Then to the news of the RTG, the national Guinean television:
https://youtu.be/tU-RGL-X1Kw (go to the 35. Minute)
In addition to paying the school fees of each student, this year we will pay for remedial courses in April and May to help the 14 girls who are taking the primary school leaving exam to succeed.
It is important to know that the primary school system, which has been in bad shape for a long time, has become a disaster in the last 10 years. The reasons are known (lack of teachers, poorly paid, with poor training, and a cruel lack of rooms ...) but without political will, and endemic corruption, nothing has been done.
The CRND and its interim president, Mamadi Doumbouya, are digitizing this ministry to stop the corruption of fictitious salaries, of teachers who do not do their job, by updating the school programs, by paying qualified contractuals formerly paid by the village communities, by distributing bonuses to encourage them to go and teach in rural areas. But despite all these measures, it takes several years to obtain better training and to build the 14,000 missing primary classrooms.
Fodécariah does not escape this misery, as only two 6th grade students passed the exam in June 2022, and unfortunately none of our sponsored girls! We wish them good luck
first of all we wish you all the best for the New Year. We wish good results for our project for the new organization and school success for all the girls who are cared for by our sponsorship.
We have decided to close the program. We will of course continue to make improvements and really take care of the remaining girls seriously, as we promised. The budget to finish this mission is guaranteed today.
So we have decided not to sell the annual calendars for the time being.
We have made an initial distribution for this year (rice, school supplies, aprons and shoes, school fees...) for the remaining 62 girls in our program.
A school follow-up was established to identify and help students in difficulty. Commitments were signed with the school principals to this effect. Attendance monitors were established to ensure academic success.
We will provide detailed information on budgets and results once a year at the end of the year. We thank you for your participation and commitment, which will provide a better future for many of these little girls.
Almut Hildebrandt
Laurence Chaminaud.
Click here for the project description of the girls' promotion and sponsorship
Surely some of you have wondered why you did not receive an email about the Africa calendar this year.
The decision not to sell a calendar this year was not easy for us and has several reasons. First of all, because of the pandemic we were not able to take photos on site in recent years and there were other priorities for the last delegation this spring.
In terms of content, the aim is to consolidate the girls' program in such a way that we can ensure support for the 62 girls currently in the program until they finish school. This would be the case for the girls who were last admitted to the program in 2032. Since 10 years is a long time, especially for a small club with little young talent, we want to focus on quality versus quantity in the coming years. In concrete terms, this means that we will no longer accept new girls into the support program, but will pursue various activities to improve the quality of the program. These will certainly include tutoring programs as well as the establishment of learning groups, sponsorships by older female students and other measures designed to ensure the sustainability of the program. In terms of nutrition, we also want to involve the village infrastructure even more than before and buy food from local producers whenever possible. The same applies to the production and care of school clothing. With all these measures, we hope to be able to secure the girls' program well for the next 10 years.
Project Primary School Dalaba & Balimana
As you know, the promotion of girls is only one branch of the project work of the association Bildungsförderung Oberguinea e.V.. Currently we are mainly involved in the construction of an elementary school for 350-450 pupils in Dalaba & Balimana, a sub-prefecture of Fodecariah.
The project application to the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) was approved, but the Foundation for Development Cooperation Baden-Württemberg (SEZ) has discontinued the previous co-financing after 2 years Corona. Thus, the association has to raise the required 25% own funds (24,321 EUR) on its own. Details about this project and all other news can be found as usual under these "News".
We would be very happy if you would donate to the association even without a new calendar this year.
Account holder: Bildungsfoerderung in Oberguinea e.V.
Credit institution: Sparkasse Karlsruhe
IBAN: DE226605010108052341
BIC: KARSDE66
Intended purpose: "Project Dalaba Balimana 2022-23",
With heartfelt thanks for your many years of solidarity, we wish you peaceful and happy holidays and a good transition into the new year,
Claudia