Supporting formal school systems through Accelerated Education in Mali: Success and Challenges

• In Event: How accelerated education strengthens public schooling: Experiences from Mali and Liberia

Proposal

The Education Recovery Support Activity (ERSA) is a 5 year-initiative that started in 2015 and was intended by USAID to be a transitional response to an emergency situation, addressing the needs of children and youth whose education has been disrupted by the violence surrounding Mali’s political instability that started in 2012. The assumption that the conflict was over and schools were reopening has been proven incorrect, unfortunately, which has had a profound influence on project implementation.
ERSA conducted a Rapid Education Risk Assessment (RERA) in late 2015 that provided crucial understanding of the Gao and Menaka contexts and influenced implementation strategies for the nascent project. Findings revealed significant and considerable needs on the part of formal school system into which students completing the ERSA Accelerated Education Program (AEP) were supposed to transfer. Acting on these findings required the project to adapt its strategies in order to improve the quality of formal host schools during the same period that the project AEP centers were operational. Another of these key findings was the importance of involving the communities selected for project activities in defining their participation and responsibilities over the life of the project.
To strengthen the formal education at the local level, ERSA build AEP center classrooms in solid materials within the school space and encouraged AEP facilitators and host schoolteachers to establish Communities of Practice, sharing the rich mix of learning materials developed and distributed by the project. ERSA also trained formal school principals in pedagogy as well as school safety and well-being; developed community mobilization around school access and safety; and involved school staff in the community-based juries determining the levels at which AEP graduates transfer into the formal school. Ministry pedagogical counselors were integrally involved in the ongoing training and supervision of AEP facilitators and school principals, so that they now form a cadre of AEP experts within the Ministry. Further reinforcing the local educational environment, ERSA built 150 classrooms and blocks of latrines that are now part of the host formal schools, and provided complete sets of teaching and learning materials, including Interactive Audio Programs, leveled texts, and math manipulatives, to 181 schools. Demonstrating the opportunities for extending the use of these materials to other actors within the educational system, UNICEF provided two years’ of additional funding to the ERSA team in order to provide formal school principals, teachers, and pedagogical counselors with multimedia self-training materials to develop their professional skills.
At the national policy level, ERSA leaders are members of various committees focused on improving access to schooling and has organized several activities to assess formal system needs and design district-level MoE office action plans to address them. Looking towards the long-term institutionalization of AEPs within the formal educations system, ERSA has been an active partner of MoE in the process of designing an AE policy with the focus on providing children participating in AEPs with real opportunities to transition into formal school.

Author

• Boubacar Bocoum, EDC