The Political Economy of Educational Policy Reform in Mali: a Stakeholder Analysis, Washington: Management Systems International, October 1998.

By: Robert B. Charlick, and Susanna D. Wing with the assistance of Mariam Koné (l'Association Malienne pour La Promotion des Jeunes) and Bakary Diakité (IMRAD/ Bamako)

Summary Of The Study

Educational reform Mali is part of a complex and long-standing set of reforms designed to restructure the relationship between the Malian state and its people. It is the product of a number of forces: the demand for government which is closer to the needs and realities of the people; the demand for greater autonomy and participation in the resolution of critical issues such as the provision of health care and education; and the need on the part of the Government to meet these demands with lower resource levels and central government expenditures.

As such, educational reform today is intimately involved with the twin processes of territorial decentralization and administrative deconcentration.

The context for educational reform, therefore, is full of uncertainties because neither of these processes has been accomplished much less fully institutionalized and because both involve very serious political issues and risks in addition to technical issues and solutions.

In formal terms, the Government of Mali has officially adopted a new Ten Year Guideline Policy for Educational Reform (PRODEC). It is the product of over ten years of serious discussion both in Mali and by interested donors of the need for particular reforms.

This policy, however, has not yet been translated into a general (loi-cadre) law, much less into implementational legislation. There is serious doubt that with current capabilities and pending issues this will happen soon.

A variety of actors are interested in this policy reform. This study divides them into: Donors, Governmental Actors, Operational Partners (such as PVOs and NGO), Societal Actors- such as unions, political parties and student groups, the Private Sector, and Community Groups and other forms of bottom up associations.

In the course of identifying actor interests on specific aspects of the educational reform program, we discovered that there are a number of significant conflicts of interest embedded in this program which may surface as significant political issues. Among these are: the division of public (internally and externally funded) educational resources between levels of the educational system, and the status of teachers as unionized civil servants.

In addition, there are issues which are clearly unresolved and which must be dealt with in the implementation process. These include: the definition and significance of a quality education in terms of the objectives or ends of education; the notion of harmonizing public schools (with a "classical curriculum") and a variety of other types of schools including community schools (ECOMs, or ecoles communautaire; the financing of local schools, the role of government in assuring standards and in supporting ECOMs, the placement of local schools, and the privatization of book production and distribution.

Our analysis leads us to the conclusion that while all of these issues can be viewed as technical problems, they involve the political interplay of a variety of actors. Treating these problems solely as technical issues, as has been the tendency thus far in the organization of the Pilot Committee for Educational Reform, and even in the initial consultation seminar sponsored by USAID in August 1998, is not likely to be an adequate approach to facilitating policy reform in this area.

We also believe that without much stronger community and local-level organizations which can articulate the needs of their members, this reform is likely to stop short of its objectives. There is clearly going to be a need to assist in the demand side not only for groups interested in education, but in other rural services as well. If these groups do not achieve a substantially greater capacity for demand both elected territorial councils and deconcentrated governmental services are not likely to fully support it in terms of the integration and strengthening of community schools.

EXCERPTS FOR THE REPORT [for the full report, contact Dr Charlick. R.charlick@popmail.csuohio.edu A journal article is being prepared for submission based on the broader report.]

The Educational Crisis

It is often a cliché to talk about crisis, but without doubt Mali's educational system is undergoing a series of severe crises. This reality is almost universally recognized. This provides the background to the changes in formal education which have been taking place over the past 15 years, and for the educational policy reforms which are being proposed today.

The first and most apparent of these crises is what Malians commonly refer to as the "la crise scolaire." It entails the demands which students in secondary and post-secondary education have been placing on the regime since the 1991 political transition that terminated the regime of General Moussa Traoré, and the inability of the regime to meet these demands. This crisis is manifest by repeated disruptions of the educational process by students at the secondary and post-secondary level. These students have frequently resorted to violent action against the state in order to forward their demands and have engaged in strikes which shut down not only secondary and post-secondary schools but all formal educational facilities including those at the primary level. The government, in turn, has responded by closing schools and sanctioning the leaders of the student movement resulting in the continued cycle of disruption and lost educational opportunity. This prolonged crisis was manifest again during the 1997-98 school year, and created or compounded an atmosphere of government weakness. It contributed as well to undemocratic political action on the part of all parties, such as the use of preventative detention by the government to head off potentially violent demonstrations, and the destruction of property and disruption of traffic by student organizations. This crisis has also aggravated other political tensions such as the continued refusal of a number of opposition political parties to participate in elections and to consider the elected government legitimate, since parties use the crise as proof of government ineffectiveness and lack of representativeness. Finally, it contributed to the fundamental crisis of the Malian educational system -- its low level of efficiency and poor outcomes by disrupting the operation of schools and nearly compromising the completion of the entire 1997-98 school year.

The second crisis is the more fundamental -- Mali inherited an formal educational system ill-suited to its societal and economic requirements, and policies since independence in 1960 have severely aggravated this fact to the point where Mali's basic educational system simply cannot and does not meet the needs of a society striving for sustainable development and democracy. The indicators of this crisis are too numerous to adequately cover in this report, but are well documented in the reports of the government's Programme Decennal de Développement de l'Education-- its major policy initiative on educational reform at all levels of the Malian educational system. Focusing only on primary level education they find that:

• •the level of enrollment in primary schools is still very low, and enrollment of girls lags even further behind national norms (for 1998 less than 50% with about 38% enrollment of girls);

• •the rate of school failure (wastage due to the necessity of students to repeat years of instruction) is astonishing high, even when school years have not been compromised by prolonged strikes and closures (18% repeat class in primary cycle);

• •the rate of exit from schools prior to the completion of the primary cycle is also very high (more than 5%) compromising the consolidation and retention of whatever basic skills have been acquired;

• •the relationship between school and employment opportunities is poor, creating a vast corps of unemployed and underemployed school drop-outs and first cycle school graduates. This same problem exists for students at higher levels of the educational system creating serious disincentives to satisfactory completion of a given course of study;

• •The causes of the crisis are multiple, but above all these are linked to appropriate resource scarcity, namely:

• •insufficient financial resources to assure a minimum acceptable level of educational quality even within the terms of the historic understanding of formal education;

• • inappropriate and inefficient employment of existing social and intellectual resources.

The most striking symptoms of these resources issues are

• the low level of access to state-run formal primary education despite considerable demand, with a corresponding sharp increase over the past few years of enrollment in non-governmental community-based schools -- écoles communautaire, or ECOMs (from 223 schools in 1995-96 to 1358 schools in 1998-99) ;

• •the increasingly difficult material conditions under which students and teachers labor, lack of safe and properly maintained classrooms;

• •deteriorating quality of education due to inadequately time for instruction associated with allocating substantial class time to "work projects," class doubling, split day classes, and the severe lack of educational materials including the most basic such as instructional books, paper and chalk;

• •inadequate quality of instruction and the demoralization of teachers due to lack of adequate and appropriate training, lack of supervision, excessively high workloads, particularly in double and split day classes;

• • failure to apply satisfactory evaluation standards, particularly in the Nouvelles Ecoles Fondamentalles where students are given a "laissez-passer" (i.e. passed without regard to the level of academic achievement) in order to make room for others in the system.

Responses To The Crisis In Education

Malians at various levels of society have been thinking about and taking action on the educational crisis for a number of years. International donors have been influenced by evolving educational theory, their desire to assist with the crisis in African economies through structural adjustment programs, and their support for both domestic and international reasons for the wave of political liberalization and democratization which began in Africa in the late 1980's. The current educational policy reform is a result of the convergence of all of these forces^.

Actions at the Mass Level

Faced with the inability of government to provide satisfactory access to primary education and to serious problems with the nature of that education and its impact on local-level society Malians have been responding in a variety of ways. Those with more resources, mainly in urban areas, have taken advantage of opportunities to put their children in private schools of various kinds, including for-profit schools, and religious based schools (Catholic and Medersa--Islamic). By the late 1980's this had already resulted in a significant growth in this sector of education, particularly at the secondary level, representing in 1995 about 10% of all enrollment. In 1997-98 ECOMs served a little over 5% of the children in the first cycle of education, while medersas accounted for another 4.5%. Parents with children in public schools and with the means to do so have increasingly made use of private tutors to compensate for the poor quality of public school education and the subsequently poor acquisition of basic skills, associated with over-crowded classrooms and reduced contact with teachers resulting from split day classes and multi-grade classes.

The options open to rural people and the urban poor were much more limited. A number of factors discouraged rural people from sending their children to public school to begin with, including distance to the school, the high cost of maintaining children in school particularly if the have to live away from home, discouragement about the quality of content and results, and serious questions about the values being transmitted to school children as reflected in the chronic disruption of school and society by students. These factors contribute, no doubt, to observations by a number of NGO and governmental actors that there are zones where people are simply not interested in education.

At the same time, it is evident that the demand for education has been growing, leading to the growth of spontaneous community-based (variously called écoles de base, or écoles communautaires). Some of schools reflected a desire to develop an educational experience specifically appropriate to the community in terms of values and knowledge, as in San. For others it meant trying to make use of funds supposedly available to the APE from the collection of the integrated regional and local tax (Taxe de Développement Régionale et Local, TDRL) to construct and maintain public schools with the "classical curriculum". Case studies conducted in the early 1990s have revealed that even when communities have been able to attract funding from international PVOs and church groups, such efforts have often been stymied by the difficulty in coming up with the funding from the TDRL. This difficulty was traced to a combination of lack of confidence in many APEs who were supposed to manage the funding from the TDRL allocated to education. But even more basic, the level of payment of the TDRL has been very low stemming from a variety of factors including the combining the APE's share with all other revenue, and with the negative attitude toward payment of any taxes following the revolution of 1991. This has meant that in effect the responsibility and financial burden of improving access to primary education in most rural areas fell on the communities themselves, and on NGOs and international PVOs where such assistance could be obtained. Although communities did make significant efforts and the number of community-based schools did grow, at the level of educational planning many Malians saw this as only a non-sustainable "stop gap" solution.

The 1989 National Forum on Education

In 1989 the regime and major donors conducted a consultation on education, widely known as the Etats Generaux sur l'Education reflecting the broad representation of sectors of society (mainly urban). This consultation resulted in a set of policy recommendations that would dominate for the next decade. Of relevance to primary education were the views that education should be better adapted to the socio-economic realities of the country, that there be more choices in programs beyond the primary level, and that instruction in maternal languages be introduced. Sharp disagreements, however, emerged at this time over the financing of rural schools with some favoring and others strongly criticizing the idea of financing them through the TDRL or through student labor in collective enterprises, and over how to deal with insufficient teachers and classrooms with general dissatisfaction with the practices of doubling classes up and teaching two different groups in split days.

World Bank Analysis

Meanwhile a second actor weighted in with the release of the World Bank study which concluded that although the Malian government was allocating more of its national budget to education than neighboring states, the money was not being allocated efficiently. It found that on average Mali spent 10% more than comparable states on secondary school education and 10% less on primary education, and it recommended a reallocation in favor of primary education. According to one source the World Bank's prescription on the necessity to increase primary school budget allocations became a matter of conditionality for assistance in the educational sector. In any event, in 1989 the World Bank and the Government of Mali signed an agreement (The Fourth Educational Project) which created the Fonds d'Appui à l'Enseignement Fondamental (FAEF) providing $56.2 million to increase access to primary school. At the heart of the agreement was the methodology of working with Parent-Student Associations (APE) to construct local primary schools with a 75% contribution from the fund to match the 25% contribution from the community organized by the APE. Unfortunately, this method seems to have led in a number of cases to poor results, as the existing APE officials either pocketed the 25% collected or arranged to withdraw their 25% contribution after the FAEF had contributed its 75%.

Context of Democratization

The democracy movement which contributed to the fall of the regime of General Moussa Traoré, in 1991 pushed the debate on the Malian school one step further. In the National Debate on Education which followed revolution of 1991, Malians from a variety of sectors of society expressed their desire to see the educational system open up and provide a true foundation for democracy and development. As a result a new educational ministry, the Ministry of Primary Education (Education de Base) was created with a mandate to end illiteracy, and to assure that all Malians would have a minimum education to participate, in an informed way, in the life of the country. This new political environment, coupled with series of international conferences, including the UNESCO Jomtien (Thailand) conference of March 1990) on the necessity of education for all, set the stage for the reform process.

The NEF Policy Initiative

Throughout 1994 and into early 1995 a series of forums were held on education leading up to the formulation and adoption of a policy on the New Primary School (Nouvelle Ecole Fondamentale- or NEF) by the Government's Interministerial Committee on Education (October 14, 1995). The key idea behind the NEF was to create a school which would be more closely linked to the community and to its cultural values by encouraging the use of maternal languages as well as French (and for the Medersas, Arabic) and by linking the school to the development of the community. In addition, these new schools would make use of an active pedagogy, and would assure support for schools by associating all actors, and particularly parents, with them in a direct way.

At the heart of the NEF policy was the decision to provide a common base of education in all schools -- those considered formal (public and private) and those which could be considered non-formal, as Centres d'Education pour le Développement (CED) and even ECOMs have often been viewed. In time, the distinction between these forms of education would be eliminated as they would all be assimilated to NEF schools. In NEF schools, about 50% of school time was to be spent on this common educational base such as literacy, numeracy, social studies and arts with the other 50% spent on acquiring and integrating knowledge in the context of "modular education" dealing with solving problems of every day life in the child's local environment. The NEF envisioned the expansion of the notion of the teacher to include NGOs, local resource people, and "animators drawn from either national or regional personnel."

The NEF formally adopted the principle of "pédagogie convergente" making use of maternal language instruction coupled with a warm and exciting educational environment for making learning fun. In addition, the NEF envisioned a formal relationship of contract between schools and government (usually local government) for the support of both in sharing costs and responsibilities. Finally, the NEF openly argued for multiple measures of quality depending on the end objectives of education sought by the community and the particular student and family. In this manner there would be much less educational wastage, was students failed to meet a single quality standard, such as promotion to the next cycle of education.

The NEF also envisioned the necessity to create Centres d'Animation Pédagogique (CAP) not only to support the teaching mission of these schools but to help provide for their management. In effect, the CAP would be an extension of the Ministry of Education from its national to its regional officers, and would provide a link to school directors and teachers. Many, if not most of the teachers in NEF schools would not be qualified to teach in public schools. They would be "éleves-maitres," teachers in training who had not yet completed their studies.

In effect this reform represented a radical departure from the official school structure and conception familiar, but often unavailable to many Malians. It was in fact officially adopted at the level of the Ministry working group and some schools were designated as NEF schools. For a number of reasons serious criticisms of the NEF developed at various levels of Malian society almost immediately. These criticisms focused on an administrative decision that apparently ordered school directors to make certain that the success rate (promotion rate) in NEF schools would be at least 85%.

Coupled with its already highly unconventional curriculum and its effort to openly attempt to merge various forms of formal and informal education, the NEF generated considerable opposition. Most commonly heard was the notion that this was a foreign idea, developed by French education specialists with little real Malian participation, and that it was therefore not appropriate.

Among the most important issues which effectively killed the implementation of the NEF, however, was the fact that it dealt only with the reform of the primary school level, while powerful educational interests had a great deal of concern about adopting a policy which would have implications for budget and educational demand at higher levels, but which would not deal with them. In the wake of these criticisms, the NEF was formally abandoned but many of its ideas became pillars of overall educational reform envisioned in the PRODEC exercise.