Adult literacy centres financed through FONAENF, and their erosion
Burkina Faso's adult literacy and non-formal education centres, financed through FONAENF and run by contracted operators under the faire-faire strategy, enrolled 178,021 adult learners in 2015. Enrolment fell to 113,721 in 2018 and 86,405 in 2021, when 1,885 adult centres opened against 3,094 in 2018.
86,405 learners, young people and adults enrolled in non-formal education centres (apprenants jeunes et adultes), 2021. 178,021 learners, adults enrolled in non-formal education centres at the 2015 high point of the 2015 to 2019 series (enf des adultes), 2015. Ministรจre de l'Education nationale, de l'Alphabรฉtisation et de la Promotion des Langues nationales (MENAPLN), Burkina Faso, Rapport de suivi annuel 2021 du Programme de dรฉveloppement stratรฉgique de l'รฉducation de base (PDSEB), version provisoire, May 2022, from DGESS annuaires statistiques de l'ENF, hosted by the Global Partnership for Education, retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
The ministry created FONAENF in 2002 to pool state and donor money and pay NGOs and associations to run literacy centres under the faire-faire strategy, so the state finances and supervises while operators deliver. Because each year's allocation decides how many centres open, cuts in the budget line and the spread of insecurity reduced the number of centres and learners almost immediately.
Preconditions
- A pooled fund with donor co-financing and a pipeline of contracted local operators in every region
- An annual budget allocation large enough to open thousands of centres each campaign
- Enough security in rural areas for centres to open and learners to attend, which the country lost after 2016
Limits: The figures are counts of people enrolled in literacy and non-formal education centres, not the share of adults that the gap asks for. The ministry publishes no participation rate, and on any plausible adult population the 2021 count is around one percent of adults or less, so even the 2015 level was a small programme against the construct. The 2021 figure comes from a ministry monitoring report marked 'version provisoire' (provisional), and the copy used is hosted by the Global Partnership for Education, a funder of the plan. The 2015 figure comes from a different ministry document, the SNDENF 2021-2025, and the copy used is on a third-party site (mojaafrica.net), not a government domain. The two documents do not fully agree: the SNDENF prints 2016 adult enrolment as 86,001 in one table and 88,770 in the next. 2015 is the high point of the published 2015 to 2019 series and may not be the programme's true peak, and the series is volatile: it dropped by half in 2016 and partly recovered in 2018, which shows enrolment following each year's funding, not a steady decline. The 2021 figure is up from a 2020 low of 81,350, and the ministry credits the rise to a slight increase in budget programme 060. The 2021 level matches 2016 (86,001), so the decline is from the 2015 and 2018 highs, not a steady fall. The centre counts in Tableau V-4 are for 'jeunes et adultes' centres. 'Jeunes et adultes' covers learners aged 15 and over, and the adolescent centres are counted separately and excluded here. The counts are compiled from forms filled in by the operators the fund pays, so the people delivering the programme are reporting their own enrolment. The ministry attributes the fall to reduced budget allocations, and its own reports say the security crisis since 2016 closed many education facilities, but the series cannot separate the two causes. The record has no figure after 2021, so it cannot say whether the decline continued after the 2022 coups.