Mali - Administration, Finance, & Educational Research

The Ministry of Education controls education, but efforts are underway to decentralize the system and provide more local control and parental involvement in the schools.

The school system is notoriously under-financed. In 1995, only 2 percent of GDP was used for education. The government, however, is planning to increase the part of the budget allocated to education to 27 percent by 2008. In addition, although more than 80 percent of the students are enrolled in grades one through six, only about 45 percent of the education budget is spent there. On the other hand, higher education, which enrolls slightly more than 1 percent of the students, received a whopping 17.7 percent of the education budget.

Mali's schools are widely known to be inefficient. Research has shown that bilingual education is more efficient and effective, especially in teaching girls. The introduction of the pédagogie convergente was based on these findings.