Now buildOn is on an MSNBC blog! Check out this article!

A foundation, for a school and for life

SOUNKALA, Mali – “To educate a girl is to educate a thousand people,” says Maimouna Samaké, a mother of six (including five girls). “If you put one seed of millet in the ground and rain comes, it grows and gives many seeds.”

And now Samaké, one of 2,000 residents in this small village in one of the world’s poorest countries, has a chance to see this prediction come true thanks to buildOn, an American non-profit organization that is building a school in her community.

Chemene Pelzer/ NBC News

Maimouna Samaké and her five daughters.

For 17 years, buildOn has been sending American high school students overseas to create schools in places where literacy and formal education are usually out of reach. The organization, which has built about 300 schools in Mali, Malawi, Nepal, Senegal, Nicaragua and Haiti, says its goal is to empower young Americans in mostly urban areas to get involved in their own communities while at the same time bringing literacy to children and adults in the developing world.

And with only about 70 children enrolled in Sounkala’s current make-shift school, where mud floors, inadequate lighting, few desks and an absence of books make for a less than ideal learning environment, they certainly could use buildOn’s help.

As a producer for the Today Show, I went along to Sounkala to see how one of buildOn’s projects comes together. Click here to see more.