Senegal

The education sector is part of the civil service and, as such, is protected by powerful syndicats. Inspectors, public primary-school and lycée directors, and teachers are all civil servants. Teachers must satisfy the government pedagogical standards in order to be licensed, and only licensed institutions can qualify students for state examinations.

Public expenditures on education amounted to 30.9 percent of current governmental expense in 1990. This was 4.0 percent of the GNP. By 1997, the percent of GNP devoted to education was down to 3.4 percent (UN Demographic Yearbook for 1997).

Funds for education come out of the government's national budget, from local funds, and sometimes from foreign aid. Teachers' salaries are the main expenditure for education by the government. Local areas often do their part by providing a school building with the result that sometimes there are school buildings sitting empty for lack of teachers.

All of the upheavals in education, along with the variety of coping strategies relied upon by the government of Senegal, such as multigrade classrooms, double shifts, and junior teachers, have highlighted the urgency for collecting information about student achievement throughout the country. In 1993, the government set about instituting a plan for gathering and interpreting such data. With assistance from foreign entities, the National Institute for Research and Actions for the Development of Education (INEADE) was given the responsibility of managing this assessment program. Along with this assessment plan has been the "pilot schools" project, which began in 1992. The pilot schools project redesigns the curriculum to take advantage of the local community and what it has to offer, to involve the local communities in school activities, and to foster partnerships with economic or cultural agents in the communities. One hundred pilot schools have been chosen for this project.