MOUNTOUGOULA, Mali (AP) — For Aminata Doumbia, an 18-year-old Malian, the “Shifin ni Tagne” project was a path for her life dreams. A phrase meaning “our future” in the country’s main local language, it refers to a yearslong program aimed at teaching around 20,000 young Malians to read and write in their local languages.

Backed by $25 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, over five years, the project has now shut down following the Trump administration’s decision to cut 90% of the agency’s foreign aid.

“The joy I felt when I was selected for this project has been replaced by sadness,” said Doumbia in Mali’s capital, Bamako.

She had hoped to take advantage of the empowerment program to train as a pastry chef.

”I don’t have any hope of realizing my dream (again),” Doumbia said.

Poverty and illiteracy

Doumbia is among thousands of people who now find themselves stranded in Mali, a country ravaged by high poverty and insecurity levels and where 70% of the population of at least 22 million people haven’t had the opportunity to learn to read and write, according to Sylla Fatoumata Cissé, director of a government agency focusing on nonformal education and national languages in Mali.

The USAID funding cut also came at a time when Mali’s other development partners in Europe have withdrawn their support in the aftermath of the 2021 coup, which brought the current junta leader, Assimi Goita, to power.

A path to empowerment

For many, the literacy project was the only path to literacy and empowerment.

Once literate, program beneficiaries move on to the next stage, which involves the acquisition of vocational skills like hairdressing, carpentry, sewing, welding, and pastry-making, according to Modibo Sissoko, literacy supervisor at the Malian Association for Survival in the Sahel nonprofit involved in the “Shifin ni Tagne” project.

These skills enable the economically disadvantaged to create jobs for themselves, earn a living or support their families, Sissoko said.

Local languages vs. French

“With the teaching of mother tongues, it’s possible to move quickly towards mass literacy among the population,” said Issiaka Ballo, a professor and researcher in native languages at Mali’s University of Bamako.

On the other hand, “only 30% of the population has been educated in French,” the common language in the country, he added.

USAID’s involvement in Mali had made it the primary development partner of the government. The abrupt end of its assistance hit not only the literacy programs, but also others designed to increase adult education and expand the literacy project to public schools.

The Gaoussou Dabo School in the Malian capital, Bamako, is among 1,000 schools that benefited from mother-tongue education thanks to funding from USAID.

Teachers trained for the program last year continue to teach, but the monitoring and evaluation aspect of the program has been withdrawn.

The funding cut was “a big shock for us,” said Amadi Ba, a counsellor at the Pedagogical Animation Center, which is in charge of the school in Bamako.

In a country where local language-education relies solely on funding from Mali’s development partners with little to no help from the government, concerns exceed its immediate impact on the education of children.

In 2023, Mali’s military government decided to make the country’s native tongues the official languages in place of French, which then became the “working language.” Official documents, including the constitution, the mining code and other texts, were then translated into the national languages.

The USAID cut will “certainly have a negative impact on the development of mother-tongue education, especially since it came in the middle of the school year,” Cissé said.

“We haven’t even had time to think about a mechanism to cushion the blow,” she added.

Training improves a farming business

While it lasted, the program was beneficial to many in various ways.

Oumou Traoré, a mother of two who grows onions and eggplants for a living, recalled how the training improved her farming business, particularly in pricing her goods in Bamako’s Mountougoula district.

“Since I learned to calculate the weight of my onions and keep my accounts in my mother tongue, I’ve started selling my onions myself,” said Traore, 29. “I now earn $95 instead of the $60 I used to get. This has encouraged me to grow other vegetables.”

A turn toward Russia

The 2021 coup resulted in the country turning to Russia as a key ally after severing ties with the West, including the U.S., which at some point was Mali’s leading foreign aid donor.

While some experts have said the withdrawal of U.S. aid may open the door for rivals such as Russia, whose mercenaries have been accused of human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings in the country, some say USAID has left a hole too large to be filled by others.

“It will be difficult to find takers for the projects left behind by USAID,” said Fatimata Touré, a development specialist and director of the Research, Study and Training Group civic group in Mali.

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NEW YORK (AP) — You can’t keep Stanley Tucci from his beloved Italy just like you can’t keep cheese from lasagna.

The Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning actor is once again elegantly roaming through the land of his heritage in National Geographic’s new food-travel series “Tucci in Italy,” less than three years after a similar show was axed.

“I think that visually it’s more interesting this time around, and I think that we try to go more in depth into the stories as much as you can, given the format,” he says.

Tucci goes from a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Milan where the staff grow their own vegetables — “Stop it!” he half-heartedly begs a chef adding salmon eggs to a pesto risotto — to cooking fish for anglers on the banks of the Sarca River.

“I’m exploring the complex connections between the land, the people and the food they eat in order to discover the essence of each region in the country I love – Italy,” the “Conclave” and “The Devil Wears Prada” star tells viewers in each installment.

‘The people are great’

Each episode of the first season of “Tucci in Italy” explores a different region — from Tuscany to Trentino-Alto Adige, Lombardy, Abruzzo and Lazio. It was shot over six months, from January to July in 2024.

“It’s a lot of planning, it is a lot logistics. But ultimately, once you get to where you’re supposed to be, which isn’t always easy in Italy, especially in the mountainous areas, it’s great,” says Tucci. “The people are great, extraordinary.”

In Tuscany, the cradle of the Renaissance, Tucci eats lampredotto, a sandwich made with the cow’s fourth stomach, and a beef tongue stew. In the Alpine region of Trentino-Alto Adige, he skis and munches on beef goulash and polenta near the Austrian border.

National Geographic greenlit Tucci’s new docuseries a year after CNN canceled his “Searching for Italy” despite winning Emmys for Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special.

Much of the same production staff and crew transferred over with Tucci to his new TV home, and they embraced the use of the latest drones, giving the series a sweep and majesty.

Executive producer Lottie Birmingham, who worked on “Searching for Italy” and jumped aboard “Tucci in Italy,” says the new series pushes viewers into new parts of the European nation.

“I think before we did focus quite a lot on the major cities, whereas this time we’ve kind of gone out into the wider regions,” she says. “In Lazio, for example, we haven’t just focused on Rome or in Tuscany we haven’t just focused on Florence.”

Deeper issues under the surface

The series also stops to look at some of the social issues roiling Italy, like immigration and gay rights. Tucci and his team spotlight Punjabi migrants, particularly Sikhs, who have a significant presence in the nation’s dairy industry, and the impact that Ethiopian immigrants have had despite facing racism and being treated as “other.”

“Every country does it, and it’s never a helpful thing,” says Tucci. “And after people assimilate, then they often find others to become ‘others.’ So it’s just this sort of weird, vicious circle.”

The new series — produced by Salt Productions and BBC Studios — in many ways is more true to Tucci’s initial vision, which was to look carefully at trends below the surface of what appears to be a happy, sun-blasted land.

“The original idea of the show that I had almost 20 years ago, at this point, was to show the diversity of Italy. But also to, in a weird way, dispel the myth that it’s sunny all the time and everybody’s eating pizza and pasta and everybody is happy and smiling all the time. Yeah, that exists, but that’s not everything.”

It was Tucci who suggested a stop in Lombardy after reading an article about a gay couple who haven’t been able to legally adopt their baby boy since the government doesn’t recognize adoptions by same-sex couples.

“There’s a darker side, as there are with every country,” says Birmingham. “Italians are so focused on food and family, but what does family mean? That was what we wanted to look at in that story.”

Tucci’s special touch

Tucci is part of a crowded field of celeb travel hosts, which includes Rainn Wilson, Eugene Levy, Zac Efron, José Andrés, Chris Hemsworth, Will Smith, Macaulay Culkin and Ewan McGregor. Birmingham believes her host has something special to offer.

“I think he’s particularly good at putting people at ease,” she says. “He is genuinely interested, and it is a real passion for him. He’s not hosting this series just to host it. He loves Italy more than any of us, and I think that’s really apparent.”

One of the series’ highlights is when Tucci visits Siena, a city in central Italy’s Tuscany region, and watches its medieval-era horse race run around the Piazza del Campo. Afterward, each city ward hosts a dinner party in the streets where thousands sing and toast their neighborhood.

“I didn’t know about that and I just think it’s incredible,” says Tucci, who first visited Siena when he was about 12. “Italy was a very different place and yet still is very much the same.”

It’s that push and pull of modernity and tradition that the show highlights, like a restaurant in Florence that caused a stir when traditional regional delicacies were done with Japanese styles and ingredients.

Tucci found the food delicious and worried that Italians must embrace change. “They maintain their traditions, they maintain the quality. But it also stops them from growing,” says Tucci. “There’s no reason why you can’t have both.”

LONDON (AP) — “Doctor Who” and Eurovision unite for an evening of music and intergalactic adventure on Saturday — all thanks to Russell T Davies.

Before fans tune in for the annual song contest, they can enjoy Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor and Varada Sethu’s Belinda Chandra attending the Interstellar Song Contest in an episode of the sci-fi series.

In real life, the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual musical competition and TV event that sees 37 countries compete for a crystal microphone trophy over a four-hour live broadcast. In the interstellar version, aliens from 40 different worlds vie to win, also by singing.

Davies says it took three years to pull it off the doubleheader because they had to work with the BBC to set the schedule and storylines in stone to ensure a perfect alignment.

Britain’s Sam Ryder took a “Space Man” to Eurovision before, in 2022. Now, Gatwa will read out the U.K.’s jury scores during the song contest’s grand final, held this year in Basel, Switzerland.

Talking to The Associated Press, Davies says that both Eurovision and “Doctor Who” share the DNA of old-fashioned Saturday night television, making the combination “irresistible.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: Do you feel that Eurovision and “Doctor Who” naturally share a kind of fandom?

DAVIES: I almost think every episode of “Doctor Who” is a great big celebration, sort of noise and color and spectacle, and that sums up Eurovision as well. In pitching this to Disney+ as well it’s like, “Look we’re going out in 60 of your territories” and Eurovision itself has a viewing figure that some years is bigger than the Super Bowl. There’s not many shows that can say that on planet Earth.

AP: How much fun did you have with the lore of Eurovision?

DAVIES: It’s enormous fun. It could be said if you’ve never seen a single Eurovision Song Contest in your life, you can still come along and watch this. It’s the kind of thing we’d have made up for a “Doctor Who” story anyway.

One day I’ll do that “ABBA Voyage” story where the holograms come to life and start killing people. That’s the best idea ever. We’ve got to do that one then. Can you imagine? That would be just amazing. I think there might be some copyright problems with that but we’d overcome them.

The actual pitch for the story to Juno (Dawson), who wrote it, was Eurovision meets “Die Hard.” So as you will see, the moment it starts, there’s trouble, someone’s out to sabotage it. There are villains behind the scenes trying to disrupt the program. All chaos is let loose and the rest of the episode is spent saving people’s lives after that.

AP: How about the songs?

DAVIES: I think there’s four songs in total (by Murray Gold). Obviously we don’t get to all 40 planets with their songs, but it was a very big production. We had to hive this off into its own production unit. There are scenes in the television gallery, where 40 different monitors have output of 40 different screens. And that’s all been fed in live. That’s not done with green screen afterwards, that’s all stuff they’d already shot. Crowds, acts, rehearsals, backstage, presenters, all of that stuff, playing onto that set, so it’s terribly complicated.

AP: Is this the most expensive episode of “Doctor Who”?

DAVIES: Frankly, they’re all expensive. It was a lot, yes. It had to be planned very far in advance, more than any. Once you plan something carefully, then it costs less just because you’re not busking. We allocate each story more or less the same amount of money. So I think it ends up costing as much as the others, but it just looks so good because they had so much time to plan it.

AP: Am I allowed to ask how much an episode normally costs?

DAVIES: We never say that. I don’t know why, but we just don’t ever do it. I don’t think they’d tell me. I’d faint.

AP: Are you planning to watch Eurovision this year?

DAVIES: Yes, I will be. This will be a great night. I always sit and watch “Doctor Who” — I’m old-fashioned — on its old-fashioned BBC One transmission at 7 o’clock at night.

I know people who have Eurovision parties, which I’ve never gone to actually. Look at my life, it’s devoted to television. I can’t bear other people talking over it. That would just be a nightmare. So I will be sitting in. I’ll get some nice dinner. I’ll be a very happy man.

AP: Have you got any favorites for this year?

DAVIES: I would like to go on a date with the man from Cyprus (Theo Evan). He’s beautiful. I do like the U.K. entry this year (“What the Hell Just Happened?” by Remember Monday). I have a theory it’s being underestimated in Great Britain. Just because we’re so used to losing. We’ve won five times, everyone. But this country gets a bit cynical about Eurovision sometimes. But I love our song. I think it’s got a very memorable chorus.