Courses for adult education teachers

Decentralization processes are under way in all the countries participating in this project, i.e. Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Togo, Mali, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this context, a wide range of responsibilities in complex areas such as education and health are being transferred to new communes, calling for new competencies at local level. In particular, these include the capability to create educational programmes that are not confined to teaching reading, writing and arithmetic but also take account of social, cultural, economic and political realities in the communities concerned.

SDC is developing a comprehensive, broad-based concept for basic education which covers people of all ages. The principal and most pressing challenges in the development process – such as HIV/AIDS, health in general, managing natural resources, administrative and political decentralization or access to information, especially using the new technologies – cannot be handled solely by the children who are currently of school age and have access to education. Other populations groups, in particular adolescents and young adults to whom formal education was not available, are dependent on acquiring knowledge in order to cope with their everyday lives.

SDC's realization of the importance of education for adults and of the drastic shortage of competent educators who can take on this task prompted it to become involved in this project to train teaching staff for adult education. The participants, who come from several countries of the region and from Haiti, work in various professional disciplines (health, education, literacy, local development). SDC has launched and is supporting a course of study for adult education specialists at Ouagadougou University. They will graduate with a diploma in adult development and education and/or "text pedagogy" a methodological and conceptual approach which has proved its worth in Latin America, Lebanon, the Congolese province of Kivu and in Haiti.

SDC is trying to put these two courses of study at Ouagadougou University on a sound institutional footing to make the project sustainable. The long-term aim is for the University to take over these courses and incorporate them into its standard syllabus.