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Published: August 25, 2026 4.26pm SAST
- In Mali, it is relatively common for children who grew up in villages to be sent to big cities, entrusted to the care of adults more or less closely related to their parents.
- These children are not always well treated and, when they work, their earnings are often partially or entirely confiscated by their host families.
- Although this reality is known to all stakeholders — families, NGOs and public authorities alike — the collective response falls short. Yet avenues for improvement do exist.
In the village of Woromana (Ségou region, central Mali), the story of young Mariam is known to everyone. Sent to Bamako to live with a close relative, she fell seriously ill, to the point of "losing her mind," in the villagers' own words.
Her parents, once informed of the poor living conditions in her host family, spoke about it (and the information spread throughout the village, then beyond) as far as the surrounding villages. This scene, gathered during fieldwork conducted in Ségou as part of my doctoral research, illustrates a mechanism largely overlooked by current child protection systems in West Africa.
An Informal but Very Real Alert System
My ethnographic research – whose full results are presented in my doctoral thesis – conducted between 2017 and 2025 in Bamako and several villages in the Ségou region reveals the existence of a spontaneous community alert mechanism.
While most children placed within the urban circuit retain contact with their family of origin, certain categories remain structurally more exposed to a total breakdown of this link: "talibé" children entrusted to a Quranic teacher, girls employed as domestic help, sometimes through intermediaries with no family ties, and children who have fled and ended up on the streets following fostering marked by abuse.
When a child placed with an urban host family suffers mistreatment, the information travels back to the village through other children, guardians or relatives, spreading quickly by word of mouth to the edges of the village and sometimes to neighboring villages. This collective narrative then becomes, for parents often powerless in the face of their child's situation, a form of liberated speech.
This community mechanism is complemented, in urban settings, by a second informal device: the spread of mobile phones, which has made it possible for contact between a fostered child and their parents of origin to now rarely be broken. Regular calls allow for a form of remote monitoring that did not exist a generation ago. These two mechanisms — the snowballing village narrative and the phone contact — sometimes combine directly, whether through an alert given by a neighboring village, or an unanswered call that fails to reassure, triggering intervention by a family of origin.
The return of children to the village, when it happens, is not a simple happy ending either. Families frequently observe a change in behavior in the returning child, whose urban way of life sometimes clashes with village realities. Some boys adopt habits that are new to their community of origin, sometimes even forms of delinquency rarely seen before their departure. This is a sign that this second point of rupture, largely under-documented, deserves attention comparable to that given to the child's initial departure.
A Fragile Link: When Intermediaries Become a Risk
This community alert system, valuable as it may be, must not be idealized, however. My fieldwork 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, now living in Bamako, who temporarily house girls before their placement as domestic help in an urban family. Several documented cases show that these intermediaries take a portion of the child's wages or receive a commission on the placement.
Intermediaries, however, are not the only ones involved in this appropriation. My research also documents cases where the employing families themselves divert, partially or entirely, the wages owed to the child at the time of payment, often after several months of accumulation. This diversion is sometimes accompanied by fabricated accusations of theft, allowing the employing family to dismiss the child without ever paying the amount owed. This pattern recurs all the more easily because these children, once dispossessed in this way, have no identifiable recourse to assert their rights. This absence of any complaint mechanism directly calls into question the effectiveness of legal protection for child workers.
Today, in Bamako and other major cities, we are witnessing the emergence of genuine informal placement networks, where women offer domestic help services while capturing a portion of the placed children's earnings, without any written contract or oversight from the competent public authorities.
The absence of any mechanism enabling these children to assert their rights in cases of abuse constitutes a major gap, distinct from the two informal protection mechanisms described above. Neither the village network nor phone-based monitoring can act effectively when the exploitation originates from the trusted intermediary itself.
Treating the Symptoms, Rarely the Causes
These informal protection mechanisms and their limits remain largely absent from current institutional frameworks. Despite a comprehensive legal framework (ratified international conventions, national legislation, interventions by numerous non-governmental organizations), the number of street children continues to grow 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 non-governmental organizations intervene to assist children already in precarious street situations, without being able to act on the root cause of their suffering. A root cause that my research attributes, to a significant extent, to new fostering practices that have drifted away from their traditional protective function. In other words, current systems address almost exclusively the final symptom, while mothers in Woromana and elsewhere already identify, in their daily lives, the real origin of the problem.
Malian law, however, addresses several aspects of this issue. The education framework law No. 99-046 of 28 December 1999, amended by law No. 2022-010 of 3 June 2022, makes schooling compulsory and free for every child from the age of 6, for a 9-year cycle leading to the Basic Education Diploma.
The Malian Penal Code, which came into force on 13 December 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 uneven, and a large number of children placed in early apprenticeship effectively fall outside the scope of compulsory schooling, without this gap between law and practice being subject to systematic monitoring.
This issue also arises at the institutional level. Quranic schools, not recognized within Mali's formal education system, fall outside the scope of intervention defined for non-governmental organizations. A discussion with the UNICEF office in Bamako confirmed that any structured intervention for children entrusted to these schools remains contingent on clarifying this status, which is currently unresolved. This situation leaves thousands of children beyond the reach of any support, even as the village alert mechanism described above could, if recognized and supported, help precisely document the scale of these situations.
What Donors Can Change
Three concrete directions emerge from these findings for donors and organizations engaged on these issues.
First, invest more in preliminary ethnographic research, allowing the root causes of problems to be identified before addressing symptoms alone. This step is currently given very little value within the conventional funding cycle. Second, require the genuine involvement of all relevant actors at every level of decision-making, including families themselves and traditional authorities, whose nuanced understanding of community dynamics remains largely underused. 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 observation deserves to be stated plainly: the existence of legal texts is not enough on its own. Without sustained support for their effective enforcement, bringing together the State, 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 protection that exists more on paper than in their daily lives.