NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
Non-formal education: An alternative bridge to wage employment or a dead end? A case study from Mali
By Frédérique Weyer, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
Email: frederique.weyer@graduateinstitute.chSince the beginning of the 1990s, the universalisation of primary education has been at the top of the international co-operation agenda in education. In this context, there has been renewed interest in non-formal education (NFE), which is now considered as playing a critical role in the achievement of the objective of Education for All by reaching the learning needs of youth and adults who do not have access to formal education and contributing to poverty alleviation.
But does NFE really reach the needs of out-of-school? Does it contribute to integration into the labour market? Does it reach those aims sustainably? This short note intends to provide insights on the relationships between NFE, out-of-school educational needs, employment and sustainability by discussing data on the Educational Centres for Development (Centres d?éducation pour le développement - CEDs) in Mali. CEDs address out-of-school youth from 9 to 15 years of age in rural areas and combine a basic education cycle of four years with two years of pre-professional training. In 2006 there were 860 CEDs and 22,925 young people registered at the national level.
This short paper brings together empirical evidence collected in 2007 and 2008 in the district of Bankass (which is located at about 700 kms east of Bamako, the capital of Mali) with information regarding the outcomes of CEDs drawn from the Permanent Household Survey made in 2004 (Enquête permanente auprès des ménages - EPAM).
There is a major contrast between the images of the CEDs provided by those two sources. Indeed data collected in rural Mali presents poor learning conditions, high dropout and the inexistency of the pre-professional phase of the programme. On the other side, information drawn from the EPAM shows that the unemployment rate is lower among the economically active population from CEDs than for those who come from any other components of formal education. Moreover the incomes of employed CEDs learners are higher than those of employed people who attended other components of formal primary education. CED learners have not only access to blue-collar jobs but also are present in white-collar positions. This result is unexpected given that the CED programme does not deliver diplomas, and that the lack of certification is identified in the literature as a main limitation of NFE when considering its outcomes in the labour market.
How to explain such a gap between our two sources? A first hypothesis is that the household survey is based on a relatively small sample and might not reflect the picture at the national level. If it is the case, further evidence is needed to confirm the results of CED in relation to employment and salaries.
A second hypothesis is that the 2004 permanent household survey might reflect the outcomes of the first generation of CEDs in the 1990s. All the first experiences of CEDs were supported by NGOs both for the basic education and the phase of pre-professional training. Moreover those learners who completed both phases received material to support their installation in the labour market. It is partly to overcome the incapacity of formal educational supply to fulfil demand in rural areas that the CEDs were mainstreamed and included in 2000 in the Decennial Programme of Educational Development (Programme Décennal de Développement de l?Education - PRODEC), which promises one school and/or one CED in each village. Despite the inclusion of CEDs in the national agenda for education, in 2004 non-formal education still received only 0,7% of the current expenditures of the educational sector. The CEDs of the 2000 programme are supported by the state but the communes and the communities assume an important part of the cost of the CED programme for the first phase of the cycle and the totality of the pre-professional phase. If this second hypothesis was to be confirmed, CEDs would be another illustration of the difficulty of transforming an externally-funded pilot project into a national programme.
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