Chapter 8: The Magnificent Elephant That Was Promised Showed Up Lame: The Ten-Year Development Plan of Basic Education and Education for All (EFA) in Burkina Faso

In 1990, the World Conference for Education held at Jomtien under the initiative of UNESCO, the World Bank, the UNDP, UNICEF, and more than one hundred and 50 nongovernment organizations, declared education for all in the developing countries by the Year 2000. Yet, the Regional Forum of Dakar convened in 2000 grimly concluded that most African countries could not achieve this goal. Bertrand (2003) recalls that “It is not the first time that plans of action with ambitious time-bound goals have been set in the education sector” (p. 3). Still fresh in our minds are the Karachi Plan adopted in 1960 by 18 Asian states for the Provision of Universal Compulsory and Free Primary Education; the Addis Ababa Plan for African Educational Development adopted in 1961 by the Conference of African States on the Development of Education in Africa; these two plans were due to be achieved by 1980. There is also the Latin American counterpart, The Major Project on the Extension and Improvement of Primary Education in Latin America, “jointly scheduled by the Organization of American States (OAS) and UNESCO for a ten-year period, 1957–1966. If all these plans failed to reach their objectives, new plans with the same objectives were developed in 1981 and in 1996” (Bertrand, 2003, p. 3). Bertrand rightly wonders why the International community continues to establish clearly over-ambitious action plans.