Olivia Samuel, Aurélien Dasré and the DyPE [Childhood and parenthood] project

Enfance et famille au Mali [Childhood and family in Mali], recently published by INED Editions, is about the Bwa people, a population living in a primarily rural zone in Mali on the border with Burkina Faso.

(Interview conducted in Novembre 2024)

The SLAM surveys (Longitudinal survey in Mali) developed out of work done by  Véronique Hertrich in the late 1980s as part of her PhD thesis. With the help of local contacts and interpreters, she set up a comprehensive system for recording demographic changes in 8 and later 7 Bwa villages in Mali. Over time, a considerable number of people came to participate in data collection as part of internships, research contracts, or their own PhD work.

Here let me just mention the two main studies: a periodically updated census of family units and inhabitants in the villages (the reiterated survey), and a life story survey conducted in two of the villages using a finely detailed questionnaire on individuals’ marital, reproductive, residential, and religious trajectories. Several other data collection operations were added on later, including a genealogical anthology of Bwa lineages, surveys on the families’ economic conditions, a qualitative survey on attaining adulthood, and others.

After the initial, 1988, survey with a total of 2,800 inhabitants, new material was collected every 5 years; existing data were updated and new data recorded in 1994, 1999, 2004, and 2009, ultimately for 4,300 inhabitants. This was therefore a prospective longitudinal survey. 

It is important to highlight an extraordinary survey characteristic. Thanks to the cooperation that Véronique Hertrich was able to organize with Mali’s Institute of Statistics, her data were enriched immediately with national census data on the Bwa villages she was studying. With that cooperation in place, we were able to ensure data quality through the method of cross-referencing two bodies of independently collected data. 

The survey was due to continue beyond 2009; a new data collection process was scheduled for 2014. But the political turbulence in northern Mali made it impossible to return to the field at that time, and the situation only worsened in the following years, putting an end to this well-designed survey process. 

One aim of the DyPE childhood and parenthood research project (funded by France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche or ANR), which uses the SLAM survey setup that culminated in the book we’re discussing, Enfance et famille au Mali, was to document in fine detail the family configurations in which Bwa children live, to apprehend changes in family structure morphology and the perspectives of the people living in close contact with the children: father, mother, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. We called this set of people the individual child’s “family environment.” Through the DyPE project we were able to demonstrate the degree to which most of the children growing up in these villages live in large family groups (10 people on average) that are fairly mobile (numerous departures and arrivals in one 5-year cycle) and in which biological parents and siblings are far from the only relatives or adults surrounding and caring for the children. 

On the basis of this observation, we sought to determine how a child’s family environment (family size, whether there are several family “centers” or cores) and child’s position within the family (e.g., a son of the head of the family, a child left in the family’s care) induced variations in children’s survival or schooling. 

The hypothesis was that certain family situations (very large or small families, polygamous families, a child left in a family’s care) could constitute unfavorable factors, as existing studies have shown. However, our main conclusion was that in the Bwa villages studied, inequalities in survival and schooling were relatively limited and in fact only very slightly related to child’s family environment. As we understand it, this is explained by a type of social and community organization that is strongly attached to equality as a norm and not very open to distinctive practices, a situation that limits differentiated behavior toward children or unequal treatment of them.

Mali is starting the second phase of demographic transition. Mortality has already fallen considerably, yet fertility remains very high, at 5.5 children per woman. Among the Bwa, fertility had not even begun to fall in the late 2000s. The result is extremely strong demographic growth, with a population that doubles every 20 years. 

Our book documents how family structures adapt in response to this strong demographic growth. Among other things, we show that increased migration, together with a process where large families are broken down into smaller structures, have worked in favor of relative stability in families’ demographic structure. For example, the number of children per adult in Bwa family units has remained relatively stable despite a demographic context that could reasonably be expected to have increased that figure considerably. While that stability in the “rate” of adult and sibling presence and supervision available to children may be a positive thing for them, it is also reasonable to posit that by limiting the constraints caused by demographic pressure, this way of adapting family structures may also work against a decrease in fertility in the context studied.