Scholarships for 60 girls finishing secondary school in Mali

The drop happens in the last two years

Girls at our partner schools in Bamako and Koulikoro do not fall behind academically. They pass. What happens instead is that in the final two years — the years with fees, exam registration, transport to a school that is further away, and a uniform that has to be replaced — families with limited money make a decision, and it is very rarely the daughter who continues.

Our partner school tracked its own numbers over four years: 74 per cent of girls enrolled at the start of the cycle, 31 per cent still enrolled at the end of it. Among boys the same figures were 79 and 62. The gap is not ability and it is not ambition. It is about $170 a term.

What a scholarship actually covers

Sixty full scholarships across two schools, covering the final two years of secondary. Full means full: fees, exam registration, transport, uniform, books, and a monthly stipend that offsets the household income the family loses by not having their daughter working. That last item is the one most scholarship programmes leave out and it is the one that decides most cases.

• Sixty girls, selected by the schools on academic record and household means, not by us.
• Two full years each, so nobody is funded halfway and then abandoned.
• A named mentor teacher per school, paid a supplement for the additional time.
• Enrolment, attendance and results reported termly and published in campaign updates.

What the money covers

A full two-year scholarship costs about $680. That is the number to hold on to; everything else is the machinery that makes sure it lands.

• $20,400 — Fees and exam registration, 60 girls, two years Paid directly to the schools each term, against a signed enrolment list.
• $9,600 — Transport and uniform Bus passes and two uniform sets a year, which sounds trivial and is one of the three most common reasons given for dropping out.
• $8,400 — Monthly household stipend Around $35 a month per family during term time, offsetting lost income. This is the line that changes the decision.
• $3,200 — Books and exam materials A full set per girl per year, retained by the school library afterwards.
• $1,800 — Mentor teacher supplements Two teachers per school, paid for the extra hours rather than expected to absorb them.
• $1,200 — Monitoring, transfer costs and platform fees Termly verification visits and the cost of moving money internationally.

Seventy-four per cent of the girls start the cycle. Thirty-one per cent finish it. For the boys in the same classrooms it is seventy-nine and sixty-two.

Who is behind this

Broadfield School Trust has partnered with these two schools since 2019, initially through a teacher exchange. Selection is made by a committee at each school — the head, two teachers and a parent representative — against published criteria, and we deliberately have no vote on it, because a British trust choosing which Malian girls deserve an education is not a model we want any part of. We verify enrolment and results; the schools decide who is on the list.

Risks and challenges

Security in parts of the region is genuinely unstable and both schools have closed temporarily in the past two years. If a school closes for an extended period, scholarship funds are held rather than reallocated, and we would report that plainly. Currency movement between sterling and the CFA franc affects what each scholarship is worth, and we have budgeted at a rate five per cent worse than today's. The deeper risk is one we cannot fully solve: a scholarship removes the financial reason for a girl to leave school but not the social ones, and roughly one in ten of our first cohort still did not finish. We report that figure rather than hiding it, and the mentor teacher role exists because of it.