Chad

Preschool is not yet a widely accepted concept in Chad, as most children tend to remain at home with their mothers until they enter kindergarten. Preschools exist only in large cities. They offer a basic curriculum centering on socialization skills, and their enrollment is limited.

Primary schools offer a six-year curriculum. Children enter at the age of six in larger cities, and around age seven in rural areas. In 2000, there were 913,541 children enrolled in 3,644 primary schools, taught by 11,641 teachers. Chad has a three-tier primary school system, which includes public, private, and community-centered schools. (The latter have been developed mostly in rural areas.) In 2000, there were 2,077 elementary public schools employing 8,318 teachers; 1,302 communitycentered schools with 1,827 teachers; and 265 private schools with 1,496 teachers. The public and communitycentered schools have a 1:68 teacher-student ratio.

Teachers are divided into several categories: instituteurs and bacheliers contractuels (full-time teachers), moniteurs (teaching assistants), and suppléants (substitutes and adjuncts). Despite vigorous efforts aimed at training new faculty, it is estimated that 30 percent of primary school teachers hold no professional qualifications. The teacher-student ratio is 1:65 in rural areas and can be as high as 1:100 in large agglomerations such as Moundou, Sarh, Bongor, Abéché, Dobra, and N'Djamena, the capital. The Chadian government has launched efforts to promote the teaching of the standard curriculum in many of the local tribal languages. However, many parents, working through the influential parents' associations, tend to resist this, as they insist that their children be taught in French, especially in southern Chad. At the end of the six-year curriculum, a national exam, the CEP, or Certificat d'Etudes Primaires (primary skills certification), is administered to all children. Those who successfully pass are admitted to secondary schools, while the others are directed to vocational and technical schools. They can enter a six-year program leading to the CAP, or Certificat d'Aptitude Professionelle (professional skills certification), in a variety of manual and technical fields. In 2000, the passing rate for the CEP was 59.84 percent. Those who were held back one more year accounted for 27.69 percent, while 12.47 percent abandoned their schooling at that point.