Mali - Indigenous Knowledge : Blending the New and the Old
Based on research from an evaluation of functional adult literacy during the late 70s, focused on peanut-growing in the western region of Mali, results demonstrated that while literacy programs only attained its full quantitative objectives in just...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2000/10/1681433/mali-indigenous-knowledge-blending-new-old-vol-1-1 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/10813 |
| Summary: | Based on research from an evaluation of
functional adult literacy during the late 70s, focused on
peanut-growing in the western region of Mali, results
demonstrated that while literacy programs only attained its
full quantitative objectives in just a few localities, the
vast majority of participating communities, had nonetheless
managed to produce a nucleus of literate people. These
people, in charge of marketing commercial crops, including
monitoring tax bills, soon enhanced the magnitude of
literacy's uses in the rural environment. However,
indigenous knowledge, which is social in nature, and
culturally transmitted, comes forth in social situations,
where groups of people resolve their perceptions, or
communicate their wisdom across generations. The note thus
focuses on the efforts by the Bank, and the Ministry of
Education in supporting methods, and new directions for
non-formal basic education, premised on the notion that
literacy should be a starting point for training, relevant
to rural development. The training had five closely related
elements: technical content; hands-on developmental work;
field inquiry or local needs assessment; comparison with
indigenous knowledge; and, experimental trial and analysis.
Varied training results, i.e., waterborne diseases, soil
fertility, and indigenous accounting systems, produced new
methodologies, evolving into a pedagogy to express
indigenous knowledge, by focusing on local needs, based on
local knowledge, associating local people as teachers in the
learning process, and creating a context for collective reflection. |
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