Soil organic matter is an important component of the global carbon balance. The loss of organic matter results in an increase of atmospheric carbon, which is thought to be responsible for global warming. Thus measurement and assessment of soil organic carbon is more important than ever before.  Conventional chemical methods of soil organic carbon determination require large amounts of time and labor, some methods are pollutive, and the best methods usually exceed the resources of developing nations. There is current interest in the use of visible near infrared spectroscopy (VNIRS) as a quick, non-destructive and less costly method for soil property characterization. For the present study 205 samples were collected from selected agro-ecological zones of Mali. Samples were selected with clay content ranging from 3 to 60% and soil organic carbon ranging from 0.2 to 1.5% to maximize the variation. We compared soil organic carbon (%OC) determined by the standard method (combustion) with the visible near infrared spectroscopy measurements. Using an Agrispec^TM spectroradiometer for scanning and with PLS/ParLeS^R regression we obtained for carbon calibration an adj. R² of 0.91 and for iron (ammonium oxalate extraction) 0.83. On the other hand the calibration of soil aluminum and phosphate (ammonium oxalate extraction) was not acceptable with adj. R² of 0.18 for aluminum and 0.30 for phosphate.