Djibouti

Mothers have advocated throughout neighborhoods to make sure all the students can get back to school.
Djibouti: An opportunity to transform education through enhanced sector dialogue during the COVID-19 crisis
Since March 2020, the Djibouti Ministry of Education and National training, together with GPE and other partners have been working to find solutions to address school closures due to the COVID-19 crisis. Here is an overview of the results obtained so far.
  • Partner since: 2006
  • Total grant support: US$33,481,429
  • Coordinating agency: UNICEF
  • Country team lead: Adrien Alain Boucher

COVID-19 response

Allocation: US$3.5 million

Years: 2020-2022

Grant agent: World Bank

Key documents:

The US$3.5 million COVID-19 grant supports:

  • improving access to quality remote learning through developing and broadcasting lessons for TV, radio and an e-learning platform, providing learning materials for vulnerable children with limited access, and providing professional development to teachers, advisors and inspectors on the effective delivery of remote learning approaches
  • healthy and safe re-opening of schools, with psychosocial support programs in primary and middle schools, latrines and WASH infrastructure to provide improved school hygiene, back-to-school campaigns to motivate vulnerable students at risk of drop-out (girls, students with disabilities), learning diagnostic when schools reopen, literacy courses for refugee families, and remedial lessons to cover missed content
  • strengthening resilience to emergencies of the education sector by providing educational hardware, software and internet connectivity for schools located in disadvantaged zones; building capacity in emergency planning and management; providing equipment and rehabilitate pedagogical resource centers; and strengthening educational television channel through equipment and training.

In late March 2020, the UNICEF office in Djibouti received a GPE grant of US$70,000 to support the Ministry of Education with distance learning programs, including paper-based learning.

Education in Djibouti

The government of Djibouti recognizes education as essential for growth and human development. As a result, the government has placed education at the center of its development policies. In 2000, an education reform was initiated with the goal of improving access, quality, and relevance.

Despite progress in increasing access and coverage in education, access to education continues to be one of the country’s major challenges. Other challenges include quality, the availability of learning materials, and disparities due to gender, geographic areas, and socio-economic status.

The education sector plan (2010-2019) is focused on six main objectives:

  1. Develop preschool education in collaboration with the private sector, the community, and public institutions, focusing on students from rural areas and impoverished backgrounds.
  2. Achieve 100% enrollment in primary education and 79% in middle school by 2019.
  3. Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, and achieving gender equality by 2019.
  4. Guarantee that all students learn at least 75% of the skills defined by the language, mathematics, science, and life skills curriculum.
  5. Reform secondary education, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) to ensure relevancy of training to the labor market.
  6. Improve governance practices at all levels to ensure effective and efficient management and utilization of services.

The government also developed an education action plan for 2014-2016. The action plan for 2017-2019 is being finalized. This action plan focuses on specific strategies for pre-primary education, primary, middle school, secondary school, and TVET.

These strategies include:

  • Develop public preschools in rural areas and for special education services based on a community model to increase enrollment rates.
  • Support schools at all levels in developing quality frameworks, monitoring, and educational projects for student success.
  • Increase the availability of textbooks and learning materials, and produce digital educational content and software to facilitate student learning.
  • Revise and update the curriculum from primary school to TVET schools.
  • Create standardized assessment tools in accordance with national and international standards.
  • Provide training to teachers, educational consultants, school management, and staff.
  • Improve the transition time between primary and middle school education.
  • Increase the percentage of students attending high school and the percentage admitted to further education.
  • An action plan for the period 2017-2019 has been prepared by the country and endorsed by partners in mid-2017.

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Latest grant

A classroom in Djibouti

School children in Djibouti.

CREDIT: Pierre Alain
Development objective: Increase equitable access to basic education, improve teaching practices and strengthen the ministry of Education’s management capacity.
Allocation: US$12,500,000
Years: 2020-2025
Grant agent: WB
Utilization: US$7,590,256

The Expanding Opportunities for Education Project (PRODA - from its French acronym) is innovative, as the total cost of US$28.8 million (co-funded by GPE, IDA-World Bank and Education Above All Foundation) is split between:

  • an investment project for $10.8 million that will support interventions that have already been defined and costed
  • a results-based financing modality for $18 million that will allow for eligible expenditures (salaries, operational costs and training costs, included in the government’s annual budget, needed to implement key activities and reforms contributing to the achievement of targets) to be reimbursed after targets of disbursement-linked indicators have been reached.

The $12.5 million GPE grant covers a large share of the investment project. It consists of a US$7 million fixed part, a $3 million results-based part and a $2.5 million additional funding.

The disbursement-linked indicators are integrated in the design of the first three components of the project, while the GPE results-based indicators are integrated into components 2 and 3.

The program’s main objectives are as follows:

1. Support the establishment of quality standards for preschool education and improvement of preschool classroom pedagogy by:

  • revising the preschool curriculum and associated teaching and learning materials, based on a quality framework with a quality assurance mechanism, to allow for successful transition to primary education
  • strengthening preschool teacher capacity through pre-service and in-service training to implement a play-based approach to learning and integration of life skills
  • building 15 new preschool classrooms and rehabilitating 26 existing classrooms.

2. Support the expansion of access to primary and lower secondary education and retention of vulnerable populations, including refugees, girls, rural students and special needs students, by:

  • developing a medium-term school expansion plan to modernize school infrastructure with climate change considerations
  • rehabilitating rural primary and lower secondary schools with water point, latrines and an electrical or solar power source
  • operationalizing primary and lower secondary school canteens
  • supporting the Ministry to assume operation of refugee schools in camps formerly run by NGOs or UNHCR to make them part of the national education system in line with the pledge in the Education Action Plan of the Djibouti Declaration
  • developing a strategy and campaign to promote inclusive education
  • developing local plans in all five regions of the country to promote enrollment and reduce dropout through locally-identify solutions, on a pilot basis.

3. Build capacity to support teaching and learning by:

  • Improving the quality of the evaluation of learning outcomes in reading and math at grade 4, and the primary school exams at grade 2 and 5, known as the Objectifs Terminaux d’Intégration (OTI)
  • Introducing an evaluation of digital competencies in primary school for grade 4 students.

4. Support EMIS modernization and project management, monitoring and evaluation, and improvements in management in the Ministry of education and professional training (MINEFOP).

Grants

All amounts are in US dollars.

Grant type Years Allocations Utilization Grant agent  
COVID-19 2020-2022 3,500,000 0 WB  
Program implementation and Multiplier 2020-2025 12,500,000 7,590,256 WB Progress report
Program implementation 2014-2018 3,798,499 3,798,499 WB Completion report
2010-2013 3,998,074 3,998,073 WB Completion report
2006-2010 8,000,000 8,000,000 WB  
Sector plan development 2020-2023 450,000 406,098 UNICEF  
2018-2020 287,229 287,229 UNICEF  
2017-2018 212,517 212,517 UNICEF  
2013 161,534 161,534 UNICEF  
System capacity 2023 105,530 0 UNICEF  
Program development 2020-2021 70,000 69,945 WB  
2018-2019 199,105 199,105 WB  
2013 198,941 198,941 WB  
  Total 33,481,429 24,922,197    
Data last updated: May 26, 2023
Last updated October 19, 2021