Shared values, cultural diversity and education :
What to learn and how ?

Active Pedagogy

Savanes Region, in the north of Togo

The active pedagogy program in Togo aims at improving the quality and contents of the programs, by opening up the school to its environment and developing girls' schooling. All this is related to the acknowledged importance of women's role in development. The active pedagogy project has several objectives: one of them is to get the students interested in their school, so that they can remain there. Another one is, not only to provide them with an adequate training, adapted to their milieu in such a way that it allows them to have good expectations at the end of the training period, but also to make people become interested in the school and its management. It is also meant to develop girls' schooling, check the contents of the curricula, so that it can obtain a quality-integrated local culture and the students' training management in this part of Togo.

This initiative is based on the absolute need for associating the populations to the whole schooling project. Thus, different stages are set into action and managed by the communities in order to put into action "the town's school", where the students' parents hold certain responsibilities. The teachers' training constitutes the second level of change with the establishment of a Training Center in the zone of Dapaong. A great deal of thinking about the evaluation systems of the whole elementary education has been carried out by the Ministry of National Education of Togo, in partnership with UNICEF and the NGO Aide et Action (Aid and Action). These works are followed up with the creation of a national Commission in charge of preparing the reform of the first grade education evaluation systems.

The geographical coverage of the schools is very unbalanced in Togo. In the northern Savannas, children must travel long distances, which favors absences and school wastage. Besides, the elementary teaching situation has deteriorated significantly in the last years, due to the hard and rigid programs, which have become inappropriate in terms of contents. Hence, the need for mobilizing the different educational actors in this country, in order to "move from a logic of failure to a logic of success".

Aide et Action (Aid and Action)
53 Bd. De Charonne
75545 Paris cedex 11
France
E-mail : aea@worldnet.fr

Institutional Partners
Ministry of Education of Togo
UNICEF
GREF (Association of Retired people Educators without Borders)
MOUVEN (Innovating Teachers Movement)

The project was started in 1995.