BAMAKO — The official start of the 2026-2027 school year in Mali lands this Thursday, 1 October, with all the pomp the authorities can muster: Transition President General Assimi Goïta has declared it the “Year of Education and Culture.” Yet for hundreds of thousands of families, the ceremonial fanfare collides with a brutal daily reality. More than 2,400 schools across the country will not reopen their gates, stripping over 730,000 children of any instruction and laying bare the strategic dead end into which Bamako’s military government has sunk.

How insecurity turned classrooms into casualties of war

Nationwide, more than one school in five now stands idle. This paralysis is no accident: it flows directly from the steady territorial creep of armed jihadist groups. School buildings are looted or torched by Islamist katibas that reject so-called “Western” education, and others have been repurposed as makeshift shelters for thousands of internally displaced people. The map of closures traces a geography of state retreat.

• In the far northern Kidal region, nearly 84% of schools remain shut.
• In neighbouring Ménaka, preyed upon by Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), 52% of academy schools are classed as “non-functional.”
• Gao, along with central districts such as Mopti and Bandiagara, fares little better.
• Parts of Ségou and Koulikoro are now directly exposed to the threat of the al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM).

The junta’s reversals: from promised reconquest to grinding stalemate

For a transitional government that staked its legitimacy on restoring national sovereignty and security, these figures read as a stinging rebuke. Since the coups of 2020 and 2021, the junta has executed a radical geopolitical pivot, severing ties with traditional partners: French Barkhane forces were expelled, the UN mission MINUSMA withdrew, and the Algiers peace accord collapsed. To fill the void, Bamako turned to Russian military support and Africa Corps mercenaries, formerly known as Wagner.

Yet the promised swift military reconquest has curdled into a string of dramatic setbacks. Despite the heavily publicised recapture of Kidal in late 2023, Malian armed forces and their Russian auxiliaries have become bogged down in bloody wars of attrition. The resounding defeat at Tinzaouatène in summer 2024, at the hands of rebel forces and JNIM fighters, marked a turning point, exposing structural weaknesses in the junta’s military machine. Far from containing the threat, this security-only approach triggered devastating reprisals. Jihadist groups expanded operations beyond their traditional northern and central strongholds, striking at the heart of state institutions, as seen in the spectacular September 2024 attacks on the Faladié gendarmerie school and Bamako’s military airport.

A fragmented map: where state authority still holds

Today, any honest reading of territorial control shows Malian sovereignty has largely splintered. In the vast north, covering Kidal, Ménaka and Taoudénit, the state retains only an essentially insular presence, confined to heavily fortified administrative centres. ISGS controls wide desert tracts of Ménaka, imposing its rule and collecting zakat from local populations, while JNIM and various regional armed groups fight over border routes with Mauritania and Algeria.

In the centre, spanning Mopti, Ségou and San, the rural zone has almost entirely slipped from administrative control, home to the JNIM-affiliated Katiba Macina. Insurgents mount regular blockades on entire towns such as Niono and Djenné, and enforce the closure of state schools under threat of targeted killings of teachers. In the south and west, including Koulikoro, Sikasso and Kayes, regions once spared, a rapid infiltration is now underway. Dormant JNIM cells orchestrate economic blockades, targeting fuel and major road corridors in particular, gradually choking supplies to the capital.

A lost generation, and an ideology that gains ground

Against this general deterioration, the gap between official rhetoric and Malians’ daily lives has never been starker. While transition leaders celebrate the country’s “refoundation,” access to knowledge, a fundamental right if ever there was one, keeps receding dramatically. Every closed school hands obscurantist groups another ideological victory, and they find in this idle youth fertile ground for recruitment. For hundreds of thousands of young Malians, Bamako’s proclaimed “Year of Education” risks being remembered as just another blank year amid the clatter of weapons.

By Mariama Hamani — Analyst