Burkina Faso: « Hakili Mousso » – the revolution also involves women in science
There are battles that are won in laboratories as much as on battlefields. President Ibrahim Traoré seems to have understood this, as he has just launched an offensive of an unprecedented kind in Burkina Faso’s educational landscape: the “Hakili Mousso” competition literally meaning “brilliant woman” in the local language which opens the doors of scientific fields to 153 female high school graduates who took part in the 2026 Mandatory Patriotic Immersion program. A seemingly simple gesture, yet revolutionary in its implications.
For what this competition fights is an invisible but tenacious enemy: stereotyping. For generations, a false and destructive idea has insinuated itself into Burkinabe families, classrooms, and mindsets the notion that mathematics, physics, and chemistry are naturally male territories, and that young girls would be better suited to literary tracks.
The predictable result: generations of female scientific talent stifled before they could even express themselves, and a skills deficit in fields that the country desperately needs to build its technological and industrial sovereignty.
Captain Ibrahim Traoré has decided to name this enemy and declare war on it. For him, the prejudices that have long dictated the academic paths of young girls have no place in the vision of the new Burkina Faso he intends to build.
Ignorance, in all its forms, must be fought. And the liberation of the mind the primary condition for creativity and innovation cannot stop halfway by excluding half the population from its most fertile domains.
These 153 young women recruited through competition into mathematics and physics-chemistry programs are not merely beneficiaries of an inclusion policy. They are the cornerstone of a national scientific edifice that can only be solid if it rests upon all the human genius available in Burkina Faso female as well as male.
Each one who succeeds in her field, who becomes an engineer, researcher, or science teacher, will be living proof that stereotypes lie, and that talent has no gender.
In a revolution that aims to be total, the liberation of women in science is perhaps one of the most enduring victories of all. Bombs destroy; equations build. Burkina Faso has chosen both.
Hadja KOUROUMA
