Dialia Keita

More than two million Malian are emigrants. They leave for neighboring countries (Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire), but also to the Congo and Europe, especially to France, Spain, and Greece. This process accelerated significantly during the long drought period of the early ‘70s and has continued at an increased level since that time.

Most Malian emigrants live abroad in a quasi-legal or illegal status and are subject to involuntary repatriation to Mali. Involuntary repatriation may take place as a result of government crackdowns on illegal immigrants, or it may be as a result of Malians forced to flee when neighboring countries erupt in civil conflict and outsiders are singled out for retaliation. There are no official statistics on the number of Malians who have been involuntarily repatriated, but estimates by (source) put the number at between (x hundreds of thousands and growing rapidly). In Mali there is a phrase for these people, “les repatries,” and it is not used in a complimentary way.

Being repatriated is widely seen as a symbol of personal failure, whatever the reasons for the forced return.

Dalia Keita is improving the social status of repatriated women by focusing on innovative solutions that involve farming and especially processing of farming products. The idea rests on a fundamental insight that repatriated women bring back with them new knowledge about making a product that they have learned in the time they were away from Mali – usually knowledge about a rural, farming-related product or process - that can be reproduced and marketed by groups of repatriated women in Mali and sold to Malians.

In (year) Dialia founded an organization based in Sikasso on the Mali-Côte d’Ivoire border called the “Association of Women Repatriated from Côte d’Ivoire” ARECI. Today she works across the country, carrying her message that the key to the economic solution of repatriated women’s problems lies within them, in the knowledge they have gained about products while living abroad. The key is to figure out what that knowledge is, and for repatriated women to organize and commercialize that knowledge.

Emigration and involuntary repatriation is a growing problem in West Africa. Local political conflict exacerbates xenophobia. When economic crisis strikes the first scapegoats are immigrants. In Mali and elsewhere in West Africa, the immediate response of the receiving country is for refugees to be taken care of by the Government and by international organizations: the common solution is charity based.

In recent years this has been the pattern with Malian migrants being repatriated from Gabon, the Congo and Cote d’Ivoire. “Repatries” are seen as uninvited strangers, but worse, as strangers without a local host – outsiders, intruders and a source of danger.

They do not have the same social links in communities where people’s wealth is social. They are not trusted and they stand out because of their acquired language, accent or behavior.

In a society where most people, especially young people, believe in emigration as the solution and the key to success, and in communities where emigration is the strategy that seems to offer the hope of getting a better life for self and family, repatriated people come back with nothing but the shame of having been unjustly treated: they are seen as shattering the dream for others. They see themselves as a symbol of failure and there is a high rate of depression and suicide among them. Many live in the expectation of emigrating again and would prefer to suffer and die far away from the eyes of the communities they belong to.

Local, central government and international organizations bring basic help during the first weeks after arrival when repatriated people and the conflict they fled make the news, but that support gradually dissipates.

Dialia was part of an organized group of repatriated persons from Côte d’Ivoire. She became frustrated with the lethargy, especially of repatriated men and their dependence on government and international NGOs.

She decided to organize women to find out the skills that they can use for their own survival and that of their children. Together they chose food transformation, starting with products like Atieke, Gary, Tapioca - all products of cassava, which is very common in Côte d’Ivoire but relatively rare in Mali. Dialia figured out that there was not only a high demand for these types of foods among the repatriates themselves, but also from the population in Mali that had been importing from Ivory Coast but had less supply because of the ongoing civil conflict there.

First she built a membership organization of 400 women who started by putting together 100 CFA, less than a dollar per month, to find solutions to their basic needs. (Coumba, slow down here and describe how organization developed more products, this is the real key to empowering lots of women to do lots of things, but helping each other at the same time. That is the key to her spread strategy beyond Sikasso, say that)

Encouraged by the success of the women’s enterprise, Dialia wanted to move beyond processing so she could source a wider range of agricultural products, be able to experiment, insure quality, and give women whose expertise was farming a secure environment in which to work. She succeeded in gaining access to five hundred hectares of land near Sikasso as well as several machines for agricultural work. With the farm up and functioning she has begun to build bridges to non-repatriated farmers, teaching them new techniques of cultivation and processing.

The next step for Dialia is to spread her message of entrepreneurial opportunities for repatriates via small scale farming to the larger community of repatriated women living in Mali. She is now in charge of the women’s section of the national federation of

repatriated Malians, and is working with women’s groups in (how many communities) to launch initiatives similar to her original project in Sikasso, with the longer term aim( of consolidating the products produced under a single, nationwide brand controlled by a federation of repatriated women? Need a vision here)

Born in a conservative Malian trading family with relatives in Côte d’Ivoire, Dialia was brought up in Sikasso and as a teenager she gained a reputation as a leading member of the successful local basketball team – the Amazons. When she was about to take exams leading to high school, this happy and successful period of her life came to an abrupt end when her father withdrew her from school and married her to a much older relative who took her back to his home in Abidjan where he was a migrant. In addition to managing her family of five children when she was abandoned by the husband, Dialia had a first experience of turning adversity to her advantage and worked for a commercial firm, gaining experience in presenting new products to the then flourishing market in Abidjan.

When civil war broke out in 2002, Dialia made a nightmare bus journey to return to Sikasso with her four young daughters. She left her son with his father and her son subsequently disappeared. She never saw her son again and has since divorced her husband.

Repatriated to the town where she had grown up, her first priority was to respond to the needs of women: looking after the sick and injured, finding basic food, and organizing a drive for Malian nationality papers for children so that they could be enrolled in school.

Through organizing women she came to the attention of local authorities and was selected to attend training courses in project design and, most usefully, to the highly selective Songhai Centre in Benin specializing in post harvest and intermediate technology.