NEW TECHNOLOGY

NOUAKCHOTT, February 6, 2009—As the new school year began in Mauritania last October, the Ministry of Education distributed school supplies to more than 100 schools across the country with support from the Education for All – Fast Track Initiative (EFA-FTI) project, an international partnership administered by the World Bank.

EFA-FTI was launched in 2002 to help low-income countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for education. Mauritania joined the program the same year.

Challenges facing Mauritania’s public schools

Despite achieving a gross enrollment rate of 95 percent at the primary school level in 2007-2008, and near-universal access across gender lines (girls accounted for 50 percent of enrolled students), the school system in Mauritania has been faced enormous challenges. These challenges include low performance rates, unequal availability of textbooks and other learning support materials, inequality of access to schools between urban and rural areas, and inadequate training of teachers.

Since independence in 1960, Mauritania's educational system has undergone a number of reforms aimed at addressing these and other obstacles. The most recent of these occurred in 1999, when authorities reestablished a bilingual system based on Arabic and French, after realizing that a dual track mandated two decades earlier in the hopes of improving success rates had in fact fragmented the system.

A plan to repair the school system

In 2001 the Government drafted a comprehensive Education Sector Plan (Programme National du Développement du Secteur éducatif), which provides the strategic framework under which the State committed to ensuring access to basic education for all in accordance with the objectives of the MDGs. It is that education master plan which provides the basis for EFA-FTI’s current engagement in Mauritania.

In 2004 and 2007 the country received two EFA-FTI grants of $9 million and $14 million respectively. These funds have been allocated to a variety of programs, including school feeding, teacher training, and the distribution of 1.6 million textbooks across the country.

Fourteen percent of the $14 million has been earmarked for school feeding programs, which can potentially reduce dropout rates. It has been established that absenteeism was related to hunger, particularly in rural areas where poor harvests due to climatic hazards force families to take children out of classrooms to help with subsistence farming.

Infrastructure needs

Another priority under EFA-FTI funding is to build new schools or rehabilitate existing ones to help leverage the student per classroom ratio. The rapid growth in enrollment noted over the past years has not always been followed by adjustments in the physical environment. As a result, school capacity has been strained in some areas. Thanks to funding from EFA-FTI three new high schools were built between 2007 and 2008 alone, bringing the total number of public secondary institutions to 184.

Likewise, efforts are being made to help shore up teaching quality. In the summer of 2008, 2000 teachers were trained for three weeks.

“We are trying to improve the quality of education and more specifically the skills and knowledge of teachers,” said the World Bank’s Cherif Diallo, the EFA-FTI project leader in Mauritania.

EFA-FTI project goals

In the medium term, according to Diallo, the project will continue to focus on providing incentives for teachers, distributing additional learning support materials, as well as the expansion of existing schools to accommodate an increase in demand, and the feeding program, which provides meals for children twice a day at school.

Although a recent assessment found Mauritania to be “seriously off-track” in universal primary education because of a primary completion rate of under 50 percent (2006 data), the country is still praised for being one of the few EFA-FTI nations where gender disparities in favor of boys have been virtually eliminated.

And there are signs that further improvements might follow in the coming years. In 2008 the retention rate increased by nine percentage points over the previous year, reaching 50 percent for both primary and secondary education. Likewise even though the overall success rate at the high school exit exam remains below 20 percent, in 2008 there was a seven-point increase over the previous year.