Changes in the employment status of public primary school teachers in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa: The case of Burkina Faso

• In Event: Early childhood/primary ed

Proposal

Education is a labor-intensive endeavor and, as OECD (2005) put it, teachers matters. Ensuring an adequate supply of competent and motivated teachers is thus a prominent policy and management issue in this development sector; an issue that no educational system can resolve once for all. In particular, teacher shortages have become a global challenge as the Education for All movement gained momentum in the wake of the 1990 World conference on education and the 2000 World education forum (UNESCO, 1990, 2000). One of the options available to education policy-makers to address teacher shortages is to modify the structural elements of the teaching profession (World Bank, 2010; Santiago, 2002). This includes one or more of the following measures: (i) lowering the entry or exit requirements of initial teacher education (ITE); (ii) reducing the length of ITE; (iii) lowering teachers’ remuneration and social benefits; (iv) modifying teachers’ status and career structure; and (v) increasing classroom teachers’ workload. During the past two decades, trends in policy in many low-income countries have consisted in modifying most of these elements, especially lowering ITE entry requirements and length, and massively recruiting non-permanent teachers under various contractual arrangements.
While some educational systems face teacher shortages periodically, others are plagued with them chronically. Many, if not most, SSA countries fall in the second group. Indeed, they have been dealing with teacher shortages since the early 1960s when a large number of them became independent. Currently, “more than 70% of countries [in the region] face shortages of primary school teachers, rising to 90% for secondary education” (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2016, p. 2). Understanding the situation therefore requires taking a historical perspective. We do so in this paper, focusing on one of the countries that are lagging behind in terms of education for all objectives, namely Burkina Faso.
When Burkina Faso (former Upper Volta) gained independence from France in 1960, it inherited an underdeveloped educational system, with a gross enrolment ratio (GER) of only 8.6% at primary level against an average of 33.2% for all newly independent French-speaking sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries (Labé et al, 2013). Like other African countries, it embraced the objective set in Addis-Ababa in 1961 to achieve universal primary education (UPE) by 1980 (UNESCO-UNECA, 1961). Like many others, the country missed the 1980 deadline as well as that of 2000, with GERs of 16.8% and 42.3% respectively. In other words, 40 years after gaining independence, more than half of eligible children (57.7%) were still out of school in Burkina Faso. Teacher shortages constituted one of the key explanatory factors of this slow progress towards UPE (Sirois et al, 2018). Progress has been faster between 2000 and 2015: 55.4% in 2005, 79.4% in 2010 and 87% at the end of the 2013-2014 school year. The fast pace of progress towards UPE during the latter period can be attributed in large part to a major policy change in the employment status of public primary school teachers.
Burkina Faso began recruiting contract teachers for public schools on a massive scale in 1999. Up to then, public school teachers were hired as civil servants. This policy change led to a relatively diverse set of teacher statuses: permanent (civil servants and open-ended State contractuals), part time [teachers paid by hours worked], and fixed-term contract teachers). The number of State contract teachers increased rapidly, so much so that in 2015, in the public education sector, they represented 80.55%, 45.28% and 46.05% of primary, lower secondary and upper secondary school teachers respectively, the rest being civil servants. In contrast, State contract teachers accounted for only 0.6% of the primary teaching force in 2002-2003. These proportions have changed dramatically since January 1, 2016 when the Government decided to grant civil service status to all State contract teachers. This decision, the fact that the contractualization policy was applied to all State employees (not just teachers), and a regionalization policy of teacher management introduced in 2003, make the case of Burkina Faso a fruitful study case with respect to the teacher challenge in SSA.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the above-outlined changes in public primary school teachers’ employment statuses in this country—from civil servants to State contractuals and back to civil servants. Why did Burkina Faso adopt the contract teacher policy? What were the outcomes of its implementation? What led the Government to abandon this policy 16 years later? What have been the outcomes of this decision so far? How sustainable is it in the context of the education 2030 agenda? What insights can one draw from this case? These are the main questions that we address in this paper. To do so, we use data gathered in the framework of a review of the use of contract teachers in Burkina Faso (Kyélem, 2016) as well as statistical, documentary and interview data that we will gather in the coming months. We will pay particular attention to the reasons behind the 2016 policy change; the (groups of) actors involved, including teacher organizations; its effects on the sub-system and the teaching profession; and the related challenges, both present and future, that it raises. The historical perspective that undergirds our study is appropriate if one wants to understand the present situation and shed light on possible future developments. Insights gained from the study of this case can be relevant for other French-speaking SSA countries with the same policy trajectory, i.e., resorting to massive recruitment of contract teachers for public schools, creating pathways to civil service status or reverting altogether to hiring teachers as civil servants. The paper thus contributes to the ongoing debates on teacher status sparked by the implementation of contractualization policies in the public education sector since the 1990s and recent moves in some countries to do away with them.

Authors

• Martial Dembélé, University of Montreal

• Mathias Kyelem, Universite de Koudougou