Hama Ali Diallo, Niger

"The children look on me as their father"

Petelkole is a remote and desolate hamlet that lies some 32 km from the closest town near the Burkina Faso border in Niger, one of the world's poorest countries and one of the five with the lowest school enrolment. Transport in Petelkole is by foot, donkey or in a cart across the savanna of desert and stone and the odd baobab tree. When the Harmattan wind blows, it sweeps up the sand and transports it hundreds of kilometres across the Sahara, blocking out the sun for days.

When Hama Ali Diallo was transferred to Petelkole in 1972, few children attended the one-room school there. Hama Ali set out to change this. "I found the school in an absolute shambles. But I'm not afraid of hard work.

When Hama Ali Diallo needed an extra classroom he built it himself.

So I started organizing things. First, I went to meet the parents in their different hamlets, then I built an extra classroom - a straw hut - with the help of the children and youngsters." Hama Ali recalls that "when the animals graze around the school they munch at the classroom hut which is covered with dried grass and millet leaves." To ward them off, he has to cover over the hut with dung or dig a trench around it.

"The people here don't see the usefulness of education," says Hama Ali, remarking that as a nomad himself, he makes allowances for the attendance problems of his nomadic pupils. "Some don't want to enrol their children. In any case, they prefer to stay with their animals. Nevertheless, I keep spreading the word and I believe I'll succeed."

The World Food Programme, the United Nations food aid organization, provides school meals for the pupils and parents receive dry rations as an incentive to enrol their daughters. For example, explains Diallo, families with two girls at school receive 50 kg of cereal and three or more girls, 100 kg. Today, school attendance at Petelkole is at 53 per cent, higher than the 20 per cent average in other schools in Niger. Almost half the pupils are girls, many of them child brides.

Since many of them live between five and eight kilometres away, boys and girls have separate sleeping arrangements at the school.

The 41-year-old father of five, who has two wives, runs the school like a large extended family. "You have to look after the children night and day, see to their health, food, often their clothing, their instruction and above all, their upbringing."

Hama Ali's main preoccupation these days is not food but water. "We lack the capacity to bore wells to provide the pupils with a supply of clean drinking water," he states. And if he had it, he is quick to add, he would create a school garden.

"I like being with the children, listening to them and sharing in what interests them," he laughs. "That's why I'm fond of this job. It's a vocation."