Mali Education Disruption Index maps schools most at risk across all 50 cercles

A developer built the Mali Education Disruption Index to help humanitarian groups decide where education access is most likely to be disrupted in conflict-affected areas. The index scores all 50 of Mali's cercles and displays the results on an interactive map, with priority tiers based on public datasets. It draws on ACLED conflict data for 2020 to 2024, a 2023 OCHA school registry, and OCHA population estimates from the Humanitarian Data Exchange. Across the period, the data records 6,471 conflict events and 17,941 fatalities, and about 63% of the 4,491 schools matched to a cercle were recorded as closed. Much of the work involved cleaning and joining the sources, including normalising inconsistent place names and reading messy spreadsheets with standard-library Python code.