KEY POINTS
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In Mali, it is relatively common for children who have grown up in villages to be sent to large cities and entrusted to the care of adults who may or may not be close to their parents.
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These children are not always treated well, and when they work, their earnings are often partially or entirely confiscated by their hosts.
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Although this reality is known to all stakeholders—families, NGOs, and public authorities—the collective response falls short. Yet there are avenues for improvement.
In the village of Woromana (Ségou region, central Mali), the story of little Mariam is known to everyone. Entrusted to a close relative in Bamako, she fell seriously ill, to the point of “losing her mind,” in the words of the villagers themselves.
Her parents, having learned of the poor living conditions in her foster family, spoke out about it (and the information spread throughout the village and beyond) to the surrounding villages. This account, gathered during a study conducted in Ségou as part of my doctoral research, illustrates a mechanism largely overlooked by current child protection systems in West Africa.
An informal, yet very real, warning system
My ethnographic study—the full results of which are presented in my doctoral dissertation—conducted between 2017 and 2025 in Bamako and in several villages in the Ségou region highlights the existence of a spontaneous community alert mechanism.
While the majority of children placed in urban care systems maintain contact with their families of origin, certain groups remain structurally more vulnerable to a complete severing of that bond: “talibé” children placed with a Koranic teacher, girls employed as domestic workers—sometimes through unrelated intermediaries—and children who have fled and ended up on the streets following a placement marked by abuse.
When a child placed with an urban foster family suffers abuse, the information reaches the village through other children, guardians, or relatives and spreads rapidly by word of mouth to the village’s outskirts and sometimes to neighboring villages. This collective narrative then becomes, for parents who are often powerless in the face of their child’s situation, a form of liberating expression.
In urban areas, this community mechanism is complemented by a second informal system: the widespread use of cell phones, which has made it possible to maintain contact—now rarely broken—between the child in foster care and his or her biological parents. Regular calls enable a form of remote monitoring that did not exist a generation ago. These two mechanisms—the snowball effect of village gossip and telephone contact—sometimes combine directly through an alert issued by a neighboring village, or a call that goes unanswered without reassurance, triggering intervention by the child’s biological family.
The children’s return to the village, when it occurs, is not, however, simply a happy ending either. Families frequently observe a change in behavior in the returning child, whose urban lifestyle sometimes clashes with village realities. Some boys adopt habits that are new to their home community, even engaging in forms of delinquency rarely seen before their departure. This is a sign that this second breaking point—which is largely underdocumented—deserves attention comparable to that given to the child’s initial departure.
A Weak Link: When Intermediaries Become a Risk
This community alert system, however valuable it may be, should not be idealized. My field research reveals that it often remains ineffective, particularly when children pass through intermediaries with no real family ties to them—for example, women originally from the village who have settled in Bamako and who temporarily house girls before they are placed as domestic workers in urban families. Several documented cases show that these intermediaries take a portion of the child’s wages or receive a commission on her placement.
However, intermediaries are not the only actors involved in this misappropriation. My investigation also documents cases in which the employing families themselves misappropriate, either partially or in full, the wages owed to the child at the time they are due to be paid, often after several months of accumulation. This misappropriation is sometimes accompanied by fabricated accusations of theft, allowing the employing family to dismiss the child without ever paying the amount owed. This pattern is all the more prevalent because these children, once thus deprived of their wages, have no identifiable recourse to assert their rights. This lack of a grievance mechanism directly calls into question the effectiveness of legal protections for child laborers.
Today, in Bamako and other major cities, we are seeing the emergence of genuine informal placement networks, in which women offer domestic help services while taking a portion of the wages earned by the children they place, without any written contract or oversight by the relevant public authorities.
The absence of any mechanism allowing these children to assert their rights in cases of abuse constitutes a major shortcoming that differs from the two informal protection mechanisms described above. Neither the village network nor telephone monitoring can act effectively when the exploitation stems from the trusted intermediary themselves.
Treating the Symptoms, Rarely the Causes
These informal protection mechanisms and their limitations remain largely absent from current institutional frameworks. Despite a comprehensive legal framework (ratified international conventions, national legislation, and interventions by numerous nongovernmental organizations), the number of street children continues to rise significantly in Mali. Official statistical data on the subject remains scarce, and the few available studies come almost exclusively from activity reports produced by the organizations themselves.
My research shows that most nongovernmental organizations intervene to assist children who are already in precarious situations on the streets, without being able to address the root cause of their suffering. My research attributes this root cause, to a large extent, to new child-placement practices that have strayed from their traditional protective function. In other words, current systems address almost exclusively the final symptom, whereas mothers in Woromana and elsewhere already identify, on a daily basis, the real root of the problem.
Malian law, however, provides a framework for several aspects of this issue. The Framework Law on Education No. 99-046 of December 28, 1999, as amended by Law No. 2022-010 of June 3, 2022, makes schooling compulsory and free for all children aged 6 and older, for a 9-year program leading to the basic education diploma.
The Malian Penal Code, which entered into force on December 13, 2024 (Law No. 2024-027), also criminalizes the incitement of a minor to beg (Article 242-91), a provision documented in research conducted in Bamako and Ségou. In practice, the enforcement of these laws remains inconsistent, and a large number of children placed in early apprenticeships effectively evade compulsory education, yet this gap between law and practice is not subject to systematic monitoring.
This issue also arises at the institutional level. Koranic schools, which are not recognized within Mali’s formal education system, fall outside the scope of intervention defined for nongovernmental organizations. A discussion with the UNICEF office in Bamako confirmed that any structured intervention targeting children enrolled in these schools remains contingent upon clarification of their status, which is currently unresolved. This situation leaves thousands of children beyond the reach of any support, even though the village-based alert mechanism described above could—if recognized and supported—help accurately document the extent of these situations.
What Donors Can Change
Three concrete courses of action emerge from this assessment for donors and organizations working on these issues.
First, invest more in preliminary ethnographic research to identify the root causes of problems before merely treating their symptoms. This step is currently given very little weight in the traditional funding cycle. Second, require the genuine involvement of all relevant stakeholders at every level of decision-making, including the families themselves and traditional authorities, whose in-depth knowledge of community dynamics remains largely untapped. Finally, prioritize direct observation of on-the-ground realities as the primary evaluation mechanism, rather than reports produced at a distance from the situations they claim to document.
One final point deserves to be stated plainly: the existence of laws alone is not enough. Without sustained support for their effective implementation—involving the government, civil society, and field research—the provisions already enshrined in Malian law and international conventions will remain, for many children affected by this mobility, a form of protection that exists more on paper than in their daily lives.
Drahmane Fondo, Associate Researcher (LIRCES, Université Côte d'Azur) & Founder, Réseau EnfanceAfrique.org, Université Côte d’Azur
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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