Primary education in the Sub-Sahara is booming:

Mali is a template for those challenges. One of earth’s poorest nations, it also has the world’s second-highest birth rate, behind only neighboring Niger. It lags even most African nations in the share of children in primary school.

Yet a crusade is under way to get Malian children out of thatched huts and arid fields and into classrooms. Thanks partly to newfound economic growth, Mali more than doubled its spending per child between 1994 and 2004 to educate youngsters aged 6 through 14, the Education Ministry reports. Mali is also a favorite of donors, whose contributions to basic education there nearly tripled from 1999 to 2004, according to Unesco.

In each of the past five years, Mali has averaged 667 newly built first- through sixth-grade classrooms and 1,962 freshly hired first- through ninth-grade teachers.

“Our No. 1 priority is to send all the country’s children to school,” said Bonaventure Maiga, a technical adviser at the Education Ministry. “People are more and more aware that school is an absolute necessity.”

Even this, however, is not nearly fast enough for Mali’s parents. Unwilling to wait until the government catches up with the torrent of would-be learners, they are creating their own school system side by side with the official one, building caked-mud classrooms and recruiting teachers, even if the teacher’s sole qualification is having made it through the ninth grade. In the past few years, the so-called community schools have grown faster than the public schools.