Mali's Junta Is Robbing a Generation of Its Right to School

Somewhere in Mali tonight, a child is sitting on the floor of a room that is not a classroom, or is not sitting anywhere at all. The school closed because armed men came near it, or because the teacher fled, or because nobody in Bamako remembered that the building existed.

On 21 October 2026, the education cluster, the coordination body of humanitarian agencies responsible for keeping Mali's schoolchildren in some form of learning, sat down to review its work. Its agenda read like a ledger of institutional fatigue: follow-up on old recommendations, the results of a protection risk assessment, a list of what partners had delivered between January and September, the planning process for the 2027 Humanitarian Programme Cycle, an allocation from the UN's Central Emergency Response Fund, and a training session in Dioila. Each item was procedural. Together they tell a story that Bamako's officials would rather you did not read.

Ask yourself what it means when a country needs a standing emergency coordination mechanism just to keep its children learning. Ask what it means that the protection of schoolchildren has become a line item for a risk assessment, rather than an obligation the state has already met.

Let us be precise about what we know and what we are being asked to accept. Mali has been under military rule since the coups of 2020 and 2021. The junta that took power promised a transition, then extended its own timeline, expelled the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA in 2023, and in 2025 dissolved the political parties that might have held it to account. It turned to Russian paramilitaries, first Wagner and later the Africa Corps, to fight jihadist groups and guard the regime. Mali's rulers call this sovereignty. We call it a government that has traded accountable institutions for the guns of a foreign mercenary force, and then asked its own citizens to be grateful.

The results are visible in the schools. Since 2023, UN agencies and UNICEF have documented more than a thousand schools closed across central and northern Mali at various points, leaving hundreds of thousands of children without a place to learn. Teachers have been threatened, killed, or driven out. Parents have been forced to choose between sending a daughter to a school that might be attacked and keeping her at home, where she may be married off young or put to work. Every closed school is a decision, made or tolerated by people with power, and every one of those decisions has a face.

The cluster's own process proves the scale of the crisis. A protection risk assessment is not a routine exercise in a stable country. It is what you commission when children face threats on the way to class, when armed groups recruit from the schoolyard, and when the sense of safety that a school should provide has collapsed. The fact that partners were tracking their presence and output from January to September 2026 tells us that the humanitarian machine is running, but running to keep up with a fire the government has failed to put out.

Then there is the money. The CERF allocation for underfunded emergencies exists because Mali's crisis has been left behind by donors who have moved their attention to louder wars. When Europe and North America face their own budget pressures, when Gulf states and China fund their own priorities, the schoolchild in Mopti or Ségou is the first to be forgotten. And the planning for the 2027 cycle will decide again which children are counted worth funding and which are written off as a statistic.

We must also name the actors who profit from this silence. Russia's Africa Corps provides regime security in exchange for gold, access, and influence, and it has shown no interest in whether a child can read. The junta has chosen military contracts over teacher salaries. Neighbouring states that once bargained for Mali's stability are now distracted by their own quarrels. The old powers that lectured Africa about democracy have been slow to say that a country which abolishes its parties and expels its peacekeepers is moving in the wrong direction. The new scramble for African influence has many players, but its losers are always the same: the children whose futures are used as collateral.

What should happen instead? The answer is not mysterious, and Africa has already proven it works. Botswana built one of the continent's most stable democracies on diamond revenue managed through transparent institutions, an independent judiciary, and sustained investment in schools. Mauritius turned a sugar economy into a services and finance hub by protecting property rights and treating education as the core of national competitiveness. Senegal, in 2024, showed that a country can transfer power peacefully after a contested election when its institutions hold. These are not Western models imposed on Africa. They are African achievements, built on the center-right principles that Africans have always understood: rule of law, secure property, accountable government, and a state that serves its citizens rather than its generals.

Mali's junta should be required to restore a credible electoral timeline, guarantee the independence of its courts, and publish its education budget line by line, so that every franc allocated to teachers can be tracked. It should sign and implement the Safe Schools Declaration, commit in writing to protect schools from military use, and reopen closed schools with funding and security guarantees that are monitored by independent observers. Regional bodies, including ECOWAS and the African Union, should refuse to normalise a regime that has dismantled its own democratic structures, while keeping open the humanitarian channels that children depend on. Civil society, universities, and the private sector inside Mali and across the region should build teacher training, school feeding, and community-run learning spaces that do not wait for permission from the men with guns.

Donors should stop treating Mali's education crisis as an afterthought. The CERF, the Humanitarian Programme Cycle, and every bilateral agency should fund schools with multi-year commitments rather than emergency scraps. And Africans everywhere should stop accepting the lie that sovereignty means silence. Real sovereignty is a child who can read, a court that can rule against the government, and a citizen who can vote the rulers out.

So here is what we demand. We demand that the African Union suspend any engagement that normalises an unelected regime without a binding election timeline. We demand that the UN Security Council require reporting on attacks on schools in Mali as a standing agenda item. We demand that donors fund education in Mali for the full cycle, not one emergency round at a time. And we demand that Malians, the diaspora, and every African who believes in the dignity of a child press their representatives and the media to keep the lights on in those classrooms.

The children of Mali did not choose this war, and they did not choose the junta that traded their schools for guns. Every day we let the cluster meetings become routine is another day we accept their loss. Speak up. Share this. Demand the schools reopen. Our children are not a line item.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB