The National Advocacy Strategy thus aims to bring together ministries, local authorities, technical and financial partners, civil society, youth, communities, researchers, the private sector and the media around a shared vision for the future of foundational learning in Senegal.
A reform backed by concrete results
“MOHEBS” builds on encouraging results. An independent evaluation conducted by RTI International in 2023 showed a 29-percentage-point improvement in oral reading and comprehension among students benefiting from the model, compared to their peers educated solely in French.
Now deployed across the country's 18 academies, the model today reaches more than 640.000 CI and CP pupils equipped with textbooks in national languages, supported by 12.116 trained teachers, 7.327 school principals and 339 inspectors.
These results strengthen Senegal's ambition to make bilingualism a lever for sustainably improving learning outcomes and reducing educational inequalities.
Three priorities to turn achievements into lasting change
The National Advocacy Strategy is built around three complementary pillars:
Bringing together around a hundred participants, MEN authorities, technical ministries, technical and financial partners, civil society organizations, researchers, local authorities, the private sector and the media, the session helped strengthen the institutional and political ownership of “MOHEBS”, mobilize sustainable resources and broaden ownership of the model. It gathered guidance from political authorities, prompted concrete commitments from partners, and shared the monitoring, coordination and accountability mechanisms that will support the roll-out of the SNP.
« Our ambition is clear: to make “MOHEBS” an institutionalized reform, sustainably financed, progressively scaled up, evaluated and collectively championed by the Nation. It is on this condition that we will help build Senegal's school system of 2035 », said Mr. Papa Malick NDAO, Secretary General of the Ministry of National Education, at the opening of the session.
From a project to a national ambition
With this National Advocacy Strategy, Senegal affirms its determination to make foundational learning a lasting national priority, placing government leadership, national financing and the mobilization of society as a whole at the heart of the scale-up of “MOHEBS”.
« The challenge now lies in sustaining, scaling up and firmly anchoring the reform », added Dr. Astou FALL, Programs Director at Speak Up Africa, who supported the Directorate of Elementary Education (DEE) in developing this strategy.
This momentum contributes more broadly to promoting foundational learning across the continent, notably through the Foundational Learning Hub (FLN Hub), and aligns with the ambitions of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on inclusive, equitable and quality education.
At the close of the meeting, the National Advocacy Strategy was institutionally validated and will now serve as a national framework for mobilization, coordination and advocacy in support of scaling up “MOHEBS”.
Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Speak Up Africa.
About “MOHEBS”
The Harmonized Bilingual Education Model in Senegal “MOHEBS” is led by Senegal's Ministry of National Education through its Directorate of Elementary Education. It aims to establish structured education in national languages and in French to sustainably improve foundational learning and reduce educational inequalities. Deployed across all regions of the country, “MOHEBS” is part of the curricular reform drive led by the Ministry, with the ambition of shaping, by 2035, citizens grounded in their African values while prepared for the challenges of sustainable development, digital technology and artificial intelligence.
About Speak Up Africa
Speak Up Africa is a pan-African advocacy and public policy organization based in Dakar, whose mission is to catalyze African leadership and shape public policy in favor of sustainable development across the continent. Within the framework of “MOHEBS”, Speak Up Africa, under the aegis of the Gates Foundation, acts as an implementing partner alongside the Ministry of National Education, and situates this reform within its broader drive to promote foundational learning in Africa, notably through the Foundational Learning Hub (FLN Hub).
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