Liberation arrives on the back of a donkey

Tony Blair would recognise the message at once: education, education, education. He might be a little less familiar with Taklitin walet Farati's means of delivery, which is from the back of a dusty donkey as she plods from village to village in northern Mali.

All educators face obstacles, but this 40-year-old widow faces more than most in one of the remotest regions of one of Africa's poorest countries, where 70 per cent of the population is illiterate. Her specific mission is the schooling of young girls, and both the poverty and the traditions of the people are against her.

In the nomadic and semi-nomadic communities of the Tuareg peoples where she works, young girls have specific and important economic roles within families where the fathers are often away herding animals. They fetch water on donkey-back every morning, often from considerable distances, they fetch firewood, and they spend hours pounding millet, the grain which is their staple food, before helping their mothers to prepare meals. They are then married young, and education for them has long been seen as a quite unthinkable luxury. But the Tuareg leaders themselves realise this has to change if their people are not to remain in poverty, and Oxfam, through women like Taklitin, is helping the change to take place.

It is part of a global problem. There are 125 million children across the world who are not in school and it is thought that two-thirds of them are female – more than 80 million girls deprived of the chance of literacy, and the liberation it always brings. Across Africa women who have been educated have longer life expectancies, have lower family sizes, are less likely to be living in extreme poverty, and will experience lower rates of infant mortality.

It is not hard to understand why: a woman who is literate can read the instructions on a pack of antibiotics or a packet of contraceptives (or indeed, on a packet of seeds). Getting an equal number of girls and boys into school worldwide by 2005 is the first of the Millennium Development Goals agreed by the world's governments at the UN in 2000, with the aim of halving world poverty by 2015.

At the sharp end of the delivery are people like Taklitin. She is not a teacher: she has a broader role, with an appropriate French name, in French-speaking Mali. She is an animatrice – literally translated as a female animator, more broadly as an education promoter. She is based 75 miles from the nearest town in a village, Tintihigrene, where there is a school. Her job is to tour the Tuareg settlements in the arid bush country all around and persuade families to send their children for primary education, with particular emphasis on the girls.

Fifteen years ago this would have been impossible because the Tuaregs then were nomads pure and simple. Families owned herds of sheep, goats, cattle and camels, and most days they would strike their tents and move on, seeking fresh grazing. Then in 1990, alleging discrimination on a large scale, the Tuaregs staged an armed rebellion against the Mali government, and in the repression that followed many of them fled across the borders to Niger and Burkina Faso.

When peace was signed in 1996 and they returned, an organisation promoting Tuareg welfare, named Tassaght – in Tuareg it means "bond" – decided that the only economic future for the people was to become sedentary and live in villages. To this end, financed by Oxfam, it set up a series of small grain shops around which villages could form: and they did.

The sedentary bases meant schools could be established in places like Tintihigrene, and a school was started there in 1997. When it became clear that far more boys than girls were being enrolled, Taklitin was given her position, with her salary paid by Oxfam, through Tassaght.

An engaging and friendly woman with a gap-toothed smile, at least twice every month she gets on her donkey and visits other small Tuareg settlements, seeking to talk to the women as much as the men, endlessly repeating the education message, sometimes to no avail.

"Some families have problems with the idea of schooling, especially for their girls," she said. "The girls do a lot of jobs in the family, like fetching the water and pounding the millet. If they are not there, who will replace them?"

It is not only that: the school at Tintihigrene has no canteen – it cannot afford one – and some Tuareg parents are too poor to give their children food to take with them. Furthermore, there is nowhere for children from distant settlements to stay, and their parents will understandably not allow them to walk alone for many miles through unmarked brush in stifling heat.

But little by little the children are coming in. At first, boys were in the majority: in the year after her appointment in 2000, the Tintihigrene school had 53 children, 27 boys and 26 girls; and last year it had 67 children, 35 boys and 32 girls. But this year it has 81 children, 39 boys and 42 girls – the first female majority.

Taklitin said: "We have to change people's lives and reduce ignorance, which is a brake on communities. If children go to school there is a door open to the development of the village."

Oxfam African Hope

Oxfam is one of the few agencies trying to engage with the whole range of problems confronting Africa. Its emergency teams are on the spot when disaster strikes – sending emergency food, shelter, medical care and water supplies. Afterwards it puts in place development projects to help people rebuild their communities and sources of income. But it goes further, by lobbying on issues such as trade, debt and the effect of EU and US farm subsidies.