Fatima Ould Minth, English Teacher, Mauritania

Teaching English in Mauritania is an uphill battle that very few teachers will take on.  For those who do, they live with the realization that English as a language in Mauritania is ranked far behind French and even farther behind Arabic, the official language of instruction.  Ready access to English language pedagogical support is a challenge that compares only to the task of keeping uninterested students from dropping out of the class altogether.  But World Links changed all of that –at least for Fatima Ould Minth.

“None of my students have a street address to their homes, but they are all proud to own an email address”.  

Minth is referring to the hundreds of email addresses made available to World Links’ students and teachers in Mauritania through its partnership with the University of Nouakchott as the local ISP for World Links schools.  Indeed, Mauritania is a good example of how a partnership involving all stakeholders, starting with the government, can be beneficial for a country’s education system.  When the Ministry of Education expressed interest to become part of World Links in 1998, it also offered to contribute its own resources to rehabilitate computer labs and to negotiate a deal with the national telecommunications company whereby all participating schools were given free Internet connectivity through leased lines.  For Fatima, World Links contributed a positive change in the English teacher’s life.  “When I bring the students in the computer lab, I can see how eager they are to read their email and converse with other students in English.  I take advantage of their excitement and get them to do productive work online, read classical plays from Shakespeare, access international current events, and communicate with others around the world”. 

What Ms. Ould Minth does not confess to publicly, however, is how access to the outside world via the Internet has changed her personal life as a woman in her own country.  Indeed, a recent study analyzing the impact of the World Links Program on African girls and boys revealed that

 
“70% of girls in Mauritania put emphasis on the fact that the Internet provides freedom to them as women, since they no longer need to limit themselves to the controlled information given by their societies and families”.