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Institutions like the United Nations and World Bank are increasing their attention on girls education, but in countries like the West African nation of Mali only about half of all girls are enrolled in school. There are efforts by local people in rural Mali to make sure girls get an education.
Bintou Kassambara is 26 years old and lives in a town called Dioro, 150 kilometers from Mali's capital, Bamako. She started primary school much later than other children. She was 20 years old when she was in seventh grade and her family pulled her out of school.
Kassambara says her father engaged her to a cousin, an uneducated young man she did not love. She says even if she did love him, she was not ready to get married, so she ran away.
Kassambara says she did not want to stop studying in order to get married. She says she had passed a group of farmers looking at a notice. Out of all 12 people there Kassambara was the only one who could read, so she told them what the notice said.
After that, Kassambara says she realized how practical and important it is to get an education. She is not the only one in Dioro to learn that lesson.
The Benkadi Women's Association is working to get girls to attend school. According to the United Nations, 56 percent of Malian girls are enrolled in primary school, but for boys in Mali the number is 70 percent.
Assan Diakite says the association often has to give the mothers money to send their daughters to school, because sometimes they don't even have enough to buy a notebook. Plus, they leave their daughters at home to help with house work.
The Benkadi Women's Association raises money by buying rice, onions and tomatoes when they are in season and the price is low. The members dry and preserve the food until the crops go out of season and the price rises. They sell the food at a profit at the local market.
Benkadi Women's Association member Mariam Coulibaly says you can see the difference between educated and uneducated families in town. When you visit a family with an educated mother, everything is orderly and clean in the house, and there is food to eat. But she says, in an uneducated household, everything is chaotic and dirty. Belongings are everywhere and the children are wandering around like wild animals. Coulibaly says that is because they have not learned that poor hygiene can make you sick.
It is late afternoon and a teacher at the Dioro Primary School gives a lesson on sanitation to a seventh-grade class.
The 50 children in the classroom sit in groups at wooden tables, following the teacher as he paces down the aisles. They snap their fingers and even jump out of their seats when they know the answer.
But in this classroom in Dioro, there are plenty of girls. The women's association's activities have paid off, according to the vice president of Benkadi and the principal of the primary school, Sitan Coulibaly.
She says there are more girls than boys enrolled in her school.
Twelve years ago when the women's association started working, only five to seven percent of all the students at the school were girls, but today that number is 57 percent.
Across town from the school, Bintou Kassambara is up on her flat roof drying rice in the hot sun, moving her hands over the coarse grain. Next Kassambara will cook the rice and take it to the village next door, where three times a week she walks up and down the lanes, selling it to hungry villagers.
Kassambara says she cannot continue studying anymore because she has a daughter, and she has to take care of her mother, who cannot work. She also says her father was afraid if she kept studying she might not be faithful to her husband.
Kassambara continues with her chores, washing the pots and spoons with two buckets of water in her yard. She still has a few hours before her six-year old daughter comes home from kindergarten.
Kassambara says she regrets not being able to go to secondary school. She says her daughter will finish school before marriage. She will not let her child make the same mistake.
