Attirer, recruter et retenir les enseignants en zones rurales : une analyse des politiques du Burkina Faso en la matière

Teacher shortages constitute one of the main obstacles to achieving quality universal primary education and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains the region most affected by these shortages (UIS, 2014). There is evidence that teacher shortages are in general more acute in rural and remote areas (RRAs) in this region. There are two main reasons for this situation. First, compared with urban areas, the RRAs of SSA have the lowest school access ratios (Mulkeen & Chen, 2008; UIS, 2006). Efforts to enlarge coverage are therefore concentrated on these areas, which induces an important increase of teacher demand. Second, RRAs usually face great difficulties attracting, recruiting and retaining quality teachers (Mulkeen & Chen, 2008; UNESCO-BREDA, 2009). This has led several SSA countries to design policies aimed at ensuring the availability of teachers in rural schools.  In this thesis, we pursue two objectives: 1) describe the policy instruments in place to attract, recruit and retain teachers in Burkina Faso rural areas; and 2) document the implementation of these policy instruments. Our investigation was guided by labor market theories, in particular supply and demand theories as applied to the education sector and teacher labor markets, and Honig’s (2006) model for analyzing contemporary education policy implementation. To understand the effects of education policies, one can draw on various methodological approaches. After reviewing these approaches, we opted for an approach that consists in reconstructing the professional trajectories of a cohort of teachers. More specifically, we used available administrative data to reconstruct the professional trajectories of a sample of 100 teachers who received their first appointment in a region of Burkina Faso in 2005. The data covered items such as their various postings, their career advancement and their remuneration. We also conducted individual interviews with a sub-sample of the cohort. Our analyses show that the two types of policy measures implemented, based on the rural deficit model (Ankrah-Dove, 1982), are effective in the short term to attract teachers in RRAs but have limited long-term effectiveness in retaining them in most hardship RRAs.  The contributions of our research are multiple. First, it offers a fine-grained analysis of the historical evolution of teacher management policies in the context of a French-speaking Sub-Saharan African country. From a methodological point of view, the approach we developed is both innovative and specifically relevant to the Sub-Saharan African context when analyzing the implementation of policies designed to manage teacher supply and demand. Our research also demonstrates the significant value of using the analysis of teachers’ professional trajectories as a methodological tool for evaluating the effects of teacher policy implementation. Finally, with regard to to social relevance, we suggest 17 avenues for improving current policies in Burkina Faso. Although they are specifically grounded in the context of this country, these avenues can also be relevant for other French-speaking Sub-Saharan African countries that are experiencing challenges of a similar nature.

Keyphrases: Burkina Faso, Teacher shortage, Teacher management policies, Rural areas, Teacher attraction and retention, Sub-Saharan Africa