Burkina Faso: Education stakeholders work together on a workshop for a high-performance education system
On November 29, 2024, the city of Ouagadougou hosted a workshop to review and disseminate the results of the school development process initiated by the BBEE-BF project in its partner schools. This project, initiated by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and the Land Vorarlberg, is part of a drive to strengthen vocational training in renewable energies in Burkina Faso.
The first phase of the school development process involved collecting data on several aspects of the schools, including student performance, accessibility, governance, school environment and teacher quality. Following this data collection, each school carried out a detailed diagnosis, which led to the definition of its vision, strategies and priority actions to improve teaching and the school environment.
In terms of the project's added value, Pierre Compaoré, headmaster of the Lycée Professionnel Bruno Buchwieser and a participant in the process, stressed the importance of schools taking responsibility for their own development. According to him, the project has enabled us to move from a logic of waiting for external players to a proactive approach in which each school becomes an actor in its own change.
"We were always waiting for outsiders to come and support us. But with the project, we realized that a lot depended on us, and that we had to establish our own development project for ourselves, which is specific to our establishment and unique in its kind. We are no longer waiting for a third party to come and save us; we are responsible for the life of our establishment. We've already set up a steering committee, and for each section we already have volunteers committed to the development process. The project didn't just involve the administration, but also parents, teachers and students. All of them were invited to take part in the reflection on the school's development. In concrete terms, the project gave us a ten-year vision for the school, and within that vision, we put in place stages and plans to achieve our objectives," he says.
The facilitator of the CORADE process, Adama Gérard Kaboré, stressed the importance of sharing the results with other educational players in order to disseminate this experience on a wider scale. He expressed the hope that the positive impact of this initiative would continue to grow in the years to come.
The representative of the Director General of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (DGEFTP), Baraogo Kiemdé, expressed the expectation that each participant would integrate the lessons learnt from the project into their daily work.ing the lessons learned from the project into the management of their establishments, in order to foster greater empowerment and the emergence of local initiatives to improve the educational environment.
"We expect participants to be able to integrate everything that has been produced as results to improve the management of their education and training structures, because we are in a world where the scarcity of resources has led us to look for solutions to better manage our training structures. And if we are to succeed in this endeavor, we need to have a package of ideas at the level of each establishment that will enable a degree of empowerment and the development of initiatives to improve the quality of the training environment.develop initiatives to improve the learning and living environment for all those involved in education", he said.
The project coordinator recalled that the "Berufsbildung Erneuerbare Energie in Burkina Faso" project, which began in 2018, will run until 2026. He emphasized the essential aspect of vocational training in renewable energies, which aims to improve the quality of teaching and the professional integration of young people into society.
"The school development process is a participatory process that we have undertaken with the schools. If we look at the results, we can say that the project has been successful, since the schools have been involved from start to finish. We expect participants to reflect on how to popularize this type of process in all other schools. It's also a plea to institutional players to take this type of process into account in school management", said project coordinator Boubacar Zoundi.
At the end of the discussions, the expected results include, among other things, the appropriation by players in the educational community of the tools deployed as part of the participatory school development process initiated by the BBEE-BF project; informing participants about the leçons learned from the BBEE-BF process; sharing best practices with members of the educational community; and formulating proposals by participants to reinforce best practices for future school development projects.
The partner schools taking part in this process were the Lycée Professionnel Régional du Centre, the Lycée Professionnel Bruno Buchwieser, the Lycée de la Jeunesse and the Lycée Professionnel Régional Guimbi Ouattara.
Source: lefaso.net/
