Mali is a country where little information is known about the circulation of avian influenza viruses (AIVs) in poultry. Implementing risk-based surveillance strategies would allow early detection and rapid control of AIVs outbreaks in the country. In this study, we implemented a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method coupled with geographic information systems (GIS) to identify risk areas for AIVs occurrence in domestic poultry in Mali. Five risk factors associated with AIVs occurrence were identified from the literature, and their relative weights were determined using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Spatial data were collected for each risk factor and processed to produce risk maps for AIVs outbreaks using a weighted linear combination (WLC). We identified the southeast regions (Bamako and Sikasso) and the central region (Mopti) as areas with the highest risk of AIVs occurrence. Conversely, northern regions were considered low-risk areas. The risk areas agree with the location of HPAI outbreaks in Mali. This study provides the first risk map using the GIS-MCDA approach to identify risk areas for AIVs occurrence in Mali. It should provide a basis for designing risk-based and more cost-effective surveillance strategies for the early detection of avian influenza outbreaks in Mali.

Much of West Africa (and particularly the Sahel) may be once falling again under military government. This essay asks what, if anything, historians of Africa can contribute to an understanding of this phenomenon. I argue that writing the history and understanding the memory of military government will entail a renewed approach to political history and social theory. It will also entail confronting — just as so many citizens are currently doing — the peculiar failures of democracy in Africa's neoliberal era.

Bamako, March 1991. 100,000 protesters took to the street challenging Mali's military regime. Both men and women participated in six months of protests, their actions shaped by class, gender, and generation. The press, in its reporting, produced a specific, gendered, image of protest, involving young men protesters and their exceptional mères indociles (rebellious mothers) motivated to protest by the risk of bodily harm to their children.1

Jihadist groups have found a ‘safe haven’ in northern Mali. They have managed this by operating strategically to establish themselves and to develop relationships with local communities, but characteristics of the environment have also facilitated their development and survival. In northern Mali, the political landscape is fragmented, and replete with competition between the central authority and various groups of local elites, who are themselves divided. I conceptualise this fluid environment as a context that incentivises ‘political nomadism’. Using the Tuareg communities as an entry point, I explore the complex dynamics between local and national political actors and jihadist groups in northern Mali. I argue that the jihadist ‘safe haven’ in northern Mali is highly relational and has been facilitated by the form of political nomadism practiced in the region since the 1990s. The article is based on eight months of fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Mali and Niger.

Although considerable global initiatives have been undertaken to tackle anaemia, its prevalence continues to be high in sub-Saharan African nations. In Mali specifically, anaemia represents a significant and pressing public health issue. The purpose of the present study was to examine the key risk factors related to anaemia among children aged 6–24 months (younger age group) and 25–59 months (older age group). We used the Mali 2018 Demographic and Health Survey data, collected from 8861 mothers with children under five. Logistic regression was used to assess the risk factors for childhood anaemia. The results suggest that the prevalence of anaemia was 88 % in the younger and 76 % in the older age groups. The risk factors unique to the younger age group were malaria (OR 4⋅05; CI 0⋅95, 11⋅3) and place of residence (OR 0⋅55; CI 0⋅32, 0⋅94), while for the older age group, they were morbidity (OR 1⋅91; CI 1⋅12, 3⋅24), drinking from a bottle (OR 1⋅52; CI 1⋅04, 2⋅22), and micronutrient intake (OR 0⋅61; CI 0⋅40, 0⋅91). Risk factors that significantly contributed to both age groups include breastfeeding, deworming, maternal anaemia, maternal education, and wealth index. Anaemia also varied by region. The widespread prevalence of anaemia can be attributed to a multitude of factors. In addressing this issue, it is imperative to acknowledge the unique characteristics of specific regions and rural areas, where the incidence of anaemia surpasses the national average. Therefore, any intervention efforts should be tailored to the specific needs and challenges of these areas.

Available historical sources for West Africa's Middle Niger c. 1450–1650 reveal that the ‘indigenous’ (non-Arab) Islamic scholarly class was already a self-conscious, independent social entity long before the clerical revolutions of later centuries. The influence of Muslim scholars was not limited to urban environments like Timbuktu, and clerical elites claimed a number of mostly independent communities throughout West Africa by the end of the sixteenth century. Mostly based on a reading of Arabic texts such as Muḥammad al-Kābarī's Bustān al-fawāʾid (‘Garden of Beneficial Prayers’) in dialogue with the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār and Tārīkh al-Sūdān (‘Timbuktu Chronicles’), this article argues that Muslim scholars were engaged in a spiritual war for independence clearly on display since the beginning of the Songhay empire. Scholarly texts display deep concern for tempering unjust political power and the protection and attraction of women, discourses that reveal a perilous clerical struggle to assert community independence. Later armed jihads were thus not so much a break from earlier traditions of clerical pacificism, they were the natural evolution from this earlier spiritual jihad.

While studies on the role of knowledge and expertise have seen a resurgence of interest in International Relations and in literature on peacebuilding and security governance, little is known how knowledge enters the governance routines after the initial establishment of peacebuilding operations. Taking the mandate decision-making process of MINUSMA and EUTM operations in Mali in the German parliament as case for our explorative study, we ask how knowledge has entered the parliamentary process and how various epistemic practices and epistemic agency shape this peacebuilding governance since 2013. Informed by an object-centred knowledge framework, we argue that the practices and types of agency involved mostly ‘lock-in’ the governing of robust peacebuilding in Mali in much broader foreign- and security policies routines. Epistemic practices are not primarily concerned with new impulses or critical analysis, but with rendering Mali governable as interventionary object. The epistemic authority of the government is dominant and we do not find much evidence that hegemonic knowledge is challenged. Intervening agents do extract certain knowledge via transnational channels from Mali, however, broader knowledge debates or the involvement of Malian agents are missing.

Sorghum plays a crucial role in the rural economy and nutrition of rural households in Mali. Yet the productivity of this crop is constrained by limited adoption of agricultural intensification technologies, which could be partly because technology development does not properly consider farmers' preferences. This study with smallholder farmers in southern Mali aimed to assess farmers' preferences for different attributes of sorghum technologies through the lens of sustainable intensification. The study used a discrete choice experiment, a method which involves asking individuals to state their preference over hypothetical alternative scenarios, goods or services. We considered six attributes corresponding to different domains of sustainable intensification: grain yield, risk of yield loss, soil fertility, nutrition, labor requirement and fodder yield. We analyzed the data using the mixed logit model, while considering the multinomial logit model as a robustness check. The findings revealed that smallholder farmers are strongly interested in transitioning from their existing sorghum-based cropping systems to those that closely align with these domains of sustainable intensification. However, there were diverse preferences among all the smallholder farmers studied, and between distinct sub-groups of smallholder farmers characterized by their social networks and agroecological zones, which yield relevant policy implications. Overall, these results support the growing research and development prioritization and policy interests toward scaling sustainable intensification among farmers, with a particular focus on human nutrition.

This article scrutinizes recent histories of colonial and international law that use metropolitan reactions to the ‘scandals of empire’ to project a reform-oriented version of European colonialism. In French West Africa, most scandals never reached the level of metropolitan debate; they hit dead ends in colonial bureaucracies. Analyzing one dead-end scandal, the M'Pésoba Affair, this article argues that colonial justice on the ground often adhered to a politics of expediency, not a reformist rule of law. To maintain their precarious grip on power, colonial administrators had to simultaneously appease their superiors, economic interests, and powerful African actors. Resolving the M'Pésoba Affair, for one, entailed navigating the complex entanglements of cotton production, chiefly disputes, Islamic policy, and interracial sexual relationships in a backwater of empire marked by anticolonial revolt and world war. Especially in moments of crisis, political constraints shaped the application of justice.

This paper combines population and climate data to estimate the volume of migration induced by the drought events that have hit Mali since the late 1980s. The results show that droughts have had the effect of decreasing net migration rates in the affected localities. This is true for both men and women, regardless of their age. The effect of drought episodes, however, is found to differ according to localities and households’ capacity to adapt to climatic constraints: it fades in localities characterized by more diversified crops and in areas that receive more rainfall on average. Climate shocks also had an impact on international mobility: over the 2004–2009 period, around 2300 additional departures per year can be attributed to the droughts that hit Mali during the 2000s. We forecast that, under different climate scenarios and population growth projections, mobility induced by drought events will substantially grow in the next decades.