more than half of the students in fifteen French-speaking African countries start their secondary education without knowing how to write or read. This is a recent report from the Education Systems Analysis Program (Pasec) of the Ministers of Education in French-speaking Africa. “These students experience relatively significant learning difficulties (…) in deciphering writing and understanding words”, indicates this report funded in particular by the French Development Agency (AFD). A recurring issue in Côte d’Ivoire, essential both for institutions and for parents of students, is the quality of teaching and therefore the quality of teachers’ service, according to an expert. “The factor that has the most influence on student success is the teacher. A good teacher is someone who will help his students progress very quickly, ”notes Julie Higounet, training engineering manager at the Mission laïque française. It is she who is piloting the brand new Professional Development Center (CDP) project, which will train over 10,000 teachers in 15 countries in French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa in five years. The Ivorian authorities inaugurated last week this center located in Abidjan, hailing “a real godsend”. “Taking into account the very close proximity of our school systems, it seemed important to us to create this CDP”, explains Jean-Christophe Deberre, former director of the French Secular Mission, at the initiative of this project. According to him, this is “another brick in cooperation between France and French-speaking African countries”.
Train 10,000 African teachers
The CDP must train French public education personnel in Côte d’Ivoire and the sub-region, as well as those in private education. The Jean-Mermoz international high school in Abidjan, the largest French establishment in the country, houses its premises. For a week, conferences, workshops, open days and round tables brought together several hundred people, who came to “learn and train” in the education professions. The goal is to train “in five years more than 10,000 teachers and students to meet the challenge of the quality of teaching”, says François Clauzel, director of the CDP. “We want to put an end to an old method of bringing teachers together, giving them theoretical training and sending them back to their class,” he says, promising follow-up throughout their professional careers. The Ivorian Minister of Education, Kandia Camara, welcomed the installation of this center “in an increasingly competitive environment” (…) This innovative center comes at the right time to meet pressing needs in terms of ‘pedagogical engineering, initial training and continuous capacity building, ”said Julie Higounet during the inaugural ceremony. The CDP should make it possible to raise the educational system of African countries, increasingly criticized for the poor quality of its actors and its poor governance. “I sincerely hope that this Professional Development Center will help us to write together beautiful pages in the history of our school (…)”, continued the Ivorian Minister of Education. For Théodore Gnagna Zadi, at the head of a platform which brings together some fifty public and private unions, mostly teachers, “our country has started to regress in the quality of education: our comrades need this instrument to stop the bleeding and restart the system ”.
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