The Senegalese education system is beset by a multitude of crises. These are economic, political, environmental, security-related, and social. Each time, the state and stakeholders find a temporary solution before the next crisis. In order to strengthen the system's resilience, a study aimed to catalog all the responses to the various crises and to consider other ways to anticipate solutions to future crises.

The project is led by the Regional Observatory for the Resilience of Education Systems in Africa (ARESRO). The opening ceremony took place on Wednesday in Dakar, under the chairmanship of the director of the National Institute for Study and Action for the Development of Education (INEADE), Mamadou Sow, who hopes that, at the end of this work, the ministry will have reliable documents on which it can rely to improve the education system.

Professor Mamadou Dramé, an assessor at FASTEF, is the lead researcher. “We have already conducted a study covering all of Senegal to see what shocks populations in certain areas have faced, how they have managed to overcome them, and also how to anticipate what might happen next.” The project aims to identify future shocks in order to anticipate them and formulate concrete proposals for the Ministry of National Education. According to Mamadou Dramé, the Ministry needs to make decisions that are only meaningful when informed by the research findings.

Regarding the disruptions, they can be environmental in nature, such as floods or droughts, which disrupt the school year in certain areas. In some places, like Dakar, it's a late start to the school year; in others, like Casamance, there's a risk of early closure due to the rainy season arriving earlier in that part of the country.

There are also the political crises. From 2021 to 2023, teaching and learning were regularly disrupted by the political crisis between Macky Sall's regime and Ousmane Sonko's Pastef party. The days when the opposition leader (now Prime Minister) was summoned to court were almost always days of school closures in Dakar.

The disruptions are also health-related. During the Covid-19 pandemic, schools remained closed for weeks. Added to this is the security aspect, particularly the armed conflicts. "At certain times in Casamance, we had difficulties in some schools ensuring continuity of learning," Dramé points out. All these factors are compounded by social crises, including the numerous teachers' strikes that have plagued the system for decades.

The time has therefore come to see how to protect ourselves against these disruptions. "Each year, we will experience different shocks, but we must at least have information to be able to anticipate them. And it is in this sense that the results of the research we are conducting can be useful to the government of Senegal."