Privatisation of education in Mauritania

• In Event: Privatisation of Education in Francophone Countries: A Separate Case?

Proposal

In recent decades, the Mauritanian State has largely withdrawn from the education sector, prompting the rapid growth of private education: the percentage of pupils enrolled in private primary education has risen from 1.9% in 1999 to 15.8% in 2015 according to official figures. Moreover, this seven-fold increase of the private share only takes into account officially registered schools. Among the multitude of private actors that have emerged in recent years, many schools are low-cost schools, unregulated, and of poor-quality. This includes the so-called 'school-shops', which are for-profit schools proliferating without any regulation of the authorities.

Another sign of the disengagement of the State and the collapse of the public education system: the Mauritanian State organized in 2016, the auctioning, without prior public consultation, of eight public school lands in the city center of Nouakchott. The sale of these properties resulted in the closure of the eight schools, which could lead to the permanent loss of schooling of thousands of children: no other schools have been opened by public authorities in replacement and many families have no means of enrolling children in nearby private schools. In general, the Mauritanian State spent only 2.95% of its GDP on education in 2013 (3.55%), and far from the 6% recommended internationally to develop a quality education system and implement the obligation under international law of the Mauritanian State to make the most of its available resources for the realization of the right to education. The situation today in Mauritania is therefore that of a virtually non-existent public education system, with a contested quality for the only public institutions remaining.

In this context, the Association of Women Heads of Families (AFCF), the Coalition of Mauritanian Education Organizations (COMEDUC) and the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR), organized a research on the impact of privatization and commercialization of education on the right to education in Mauritania, a country which is the subject of very little research. The research will be conducted between November 2017 and February 2018 and will consist of a questionnaire aimed at a sample of the population, secondary data collection, and interviews with key informants to provide an analysis of the situation in regard to the human rights standards that have been developed concerning privatization of education. The paper will present the initial findings of the research contributing to better understand the privatisation in education phenomena in the African Francophone space.

Author

• Océane Blavot, Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights