Preliminary results of Peer Review Exercise in Burkina Faso are released

In previous bulletins we reported on the launching of the Peer Review exercise in Burkina Faso and the different stages of the review. The preliminary results of the exercise are now known.

While considerable efforts have been made to improve the quality of education, several factors are hindering progress, including:

• Non formal and informal education are still very marginal in Burkina Faso’s education system, including in the newly-developed curriculum;
• Internally, the idea of “vocationalizing” the curricula in order to more closely correlate training to employment is still not integrated in the mindset and explains the lack of commitment  to introducing change;
• Identifying the technical parameters that need to be taken into account to integrate non-formal education and translating how this will affect the curricula, teaching and learning approaches and teacher training is still a challenge.

Having identified the above challenges, the international Peer Review team has formulated the following recommendations:

• Actors from the formal, non-formal and informal systems should work together to develop the new curricula for each level:
• Creating coordination cells at the national and decentralized levels would be helpful as they would serve as observatories for the successful implementation of the reforms;
• Observe closely how the training of animators/ facilitators for non-formal education is integrated in teacher training;
• More thinking is required on the common core skills needed that will facilitate implementation of a continuum integrating non-formal education and offering bridges between formal and non-formal pathways;
• There is a need to plan the integration of pre-professionalization at primary level that will take into account the psychomotor  capacities of learners; 
• The system should ensure that 20% of the curricula addresses pre-vocationalization that would take into account the learner’s environment and facilitate the passage of learners from one form of education to another.  

For more information contact Ibrahima Bah-Lalya, Coordinator, ADEA Working Group on Non-Formal Education (WGNFE), lalyabah2@yahoo.com or gtenf@fasonet.bf