West Africa: Meeting education targets

West Africa: Meeting education targets - access versus quality

Midway to the Millennium Development Goals set in 2000, several West African countries have made vast efforts to achieve universal education and gender parity in primary schools by 2015. But education officials and teachers' unions say the push for increased access to education has come at a cost.

Students in Korhogo, north-central Cote d'Ivoire (Image: IRIN)

“Right now, governments are making a lot of effort on quantity and not quality,” Victorine Djitrinou, international education, advocacy and campaign coordinator for ActionAid International, told IRIN at a recent conference on violence against schoolgirls held in Saly, Senegal.

While enrolment numbers have improved, retention and graduation rates remain a serious problem and, in some cases, have even decreased. Officials in many West African countries say tens of thousands of unqualified teachers have a lot to do with it.

Pushed by the international community to increase enrolment, but limited by World Bank and International Monetary Fund programmes to cut costs, many West African countries hired teachers en masse, but reduced salaries and training, Education Ministry officials, teachers and aid workers told IRIN.

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