Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire • 16–18 June 2026
What does it take to build a foundational learning strategy that endures beyond transitions, a single donor, or a single programme? This was the central question that brought together government representatives, education specialists, and development partners from nine countries to Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire, for three days of candid exchange, structured reflection, and peer learning.
TaRL Africa’s investment in an international conference on Integrated Foundational Learning Strategies reflects our commitment to accelerating learning outcomes through collaboration, evidence, and shared innovation. Building such strategies requires drawing on a wider body of evidence than any single programme can offer. Across the global education landscape, there are well-established, evidence-based principles that individually show promise and, taken together, offer a more complete picture of what effective foundational learning looks like. These include the strategic use of assessment data, structured pedagogy, learner-centred instruction, foundational literacy and numeracy interventions, inclusive practices, remediation and strong systems support. By bringing together policymakers, practitioners, and implementation partners from multiple countries, the conference aimed to highlight how multiple approaches can be integrated, adapted, and scaled within diverse contexts.
Hosted by the Ministry of National Education, Alphabetisation and Technical Education of Côte d’Ivoire (MENAET) and convened by TaRL Africa, the International Conference on National Foundational Learning Strategies brought together delegations from Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guinea, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zambia. The conversations were frank, the lessons hard-won, and the connections forged across language and geography proved to be among the most valuable outcomes of the week.
The conference was anchored by an opening keynote from Madame Naminata Doukouré Nurudine, Director of Pedagogy and Continuous Professional Development (DPFC) at MENAET, who shared the design, governance, and implementation hurdles of PNAPAS (Programme National d’Amélioration des Premiers Apprentissages Scolaires / National Programme for the Improvement of Early Grade Learning), Côte d’Ivoire’s national foundational learning strategy. Speaking on behalf of the Minister of National Education, she set the tone for the three days ahead:
“Nous avons tous un objectif commun, celui de voir la réussite de tous les enfants d’Afrique sans distinction, à travers un engagement pour la lecture, l’écriture et les mathématiques qui en sont les fondamentaux. Nos enfants méritent d’être préparés pour ce niveau.” – We all share a common objective: to see every child in Africa succeed without distinction, through a commitment to reading, writing and mathematics, the foundational skills. Our children deserve to be prepared for that level.
Amos DEMBELE, TaRL Africa’s Country Director for Côte d’Ivoire, framed the conference as a moment of collective accountability, urging participating countries to use the three days to interrogate their own systems honestly and leave with concrete commitments. The conference also featured contributions from Shem Bodo of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), Ashleigh Morrell Deputy Director of TaRL Africa, and Sabina Vigani of Catalytica Consulting. They helped frame the broader continental context within which these national strategies are being built.
Cross-Cutting Themes: What This Week Taught Us
Across three days of structured dialogue, five themes emerged with particular force. The voice of Madame Doukouré Nurudine ran through all of them, woven through every session, grounding the conference’s collective reflections in the lived experience of building and sustaining PNAPAS from within the government.
1. Country ownership is non-negotiable
Time and again, our delegates returned to a foundational truth: programmes designed and led by governments, rather than by external partners, are better positioned for scale, sustainability, and long-term adoption. This is a recognition that ownership determines staying power. When a ministry can credibly claim a strategy as its own, it will defend it through political transitions, protect it in budget negotiations, and adapt it when circumstances change. When it cannot, the strategy remains fragile regardless of its technical quality. Madame Doukouré Nurudine was clear about what this partnership model has produced in practice:
“PNAPAS est une réponse stratégique aux besoins de chaque enfant afin de réussir son parcours d’apprentissage des compétences fondamentales. Il contribue de manière remarquable à l’appui pédagogique de nos enfants en lecture et en mathématiques. Cette collaboration donne des résultats probants, avec 18 000 écoles primaires et des milliers d’élèves qui en bénéficient.” – PNAPAS is a strategic response to the needs of every child to succeed in their foundational learning journey. It makes a remarkable contribution to pedagogical support in reading and math. This collaboration delivers tangible results, with 18,000 primary schools and thousands of pupils benefiting.
She also reflected on the spirit of shared ownership that underpins this collaboration, describing the governance of PNAPAS as a collective endeavour:
“C’est toute une famille qui ensemble contribue à la réussite de ce programme. Chacun joue son rôle et on évite d’empiéter sur le rôle des autres. On est dans la collaboration, mais en même temps c’est vraiment la mission spécifique de chacun.” – It is a whole family working together to ensure the success of this programme. Each person plays their role, and we are careful not to overstep one another. We operate in collaboration, but at the same time each person has their own specific mission.
This framing captures something important about how durable national strategies are built. PNAPAS is an Ivorian government programme supported by partners and the community at large. That distinction, while subtle in language, is enormous in practice. This principle of ownership extending to every level of the system was echoed by Joyce Saukila, Deputy Director for Quality Assurance at Malawi’s Ministry of Education, who described how Malawi’s Foundational Learning Strategy deliberately draws in communities alongside government structures:
“We involve the local community because every school has got a community which surrounds that particular school. From the village headman, to parents, to guardians, to the children, they are all involved in everything that is happening in the school.”
Tanzania’s experience reinforced this point from a structural angle. Mussa Julius Swila, National Coordinator for Pre-Primary Education and Foundational Learning at Tanzania’s Ministry of Education, described how the country’s strategy was designed to operate through existing government machinery rather than creating parallel implementation structures:
“The strategy is not operating on its own. It is being implemented by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology at the national level, using the machinery and tools that were already there.”
The Oromia region’s experience added a regional governance dimension to this conversation. Bultossa Hirko Lebeta, Deputy Head of the Oromia Education Bureau, was direct about what he considers the non-negotiable starting point for any strategy to take hold:
“The critical success factor for me is there should be a consensus on the importance of foundational learning to establish it as a priority at the government. Policy makers should precisely have the knowledge on how learning significantly affects the education system.”
Across all four countries, the message was consistent: ownership is built layer by layer, through the deliberate inclusion of every actor, from ministry to district to school to community, in the design, implementation, and accountability of the strategy.
2. Accountability mechanisms matter as much as strategy design
A well-designed strategy that lacks enforcement mechanisms will underperform a simpler strategy that is reliably implemented. This was a consistent message from our delegates and from Côte d’Ivoire’s own experience. Clear lines of responsibility, regular data review processes, and transparent reporting systems translate well-designed strategies into learning outcomes on the ground. Accountability, in this framing, is the infrastructure that turns aspiration into concrete action.
PNAPAS embeds accountability at multiple levels of the system. Madame Doukouré Nurudine described the World Bank’s independent verification mechanism, which provides an external check on implementation quality:
“Il faut évaluer le dispositif, il faut évaluer le protocole. Deux mois après la rentrée, la banque envoie un vérificateur indépendant pour vérifier deux choses : que tous les enseignants ont été formés à la mise en œuvre du programme, et que tous les enseignants disposent des intrants, à savoir le manuel, le cahier d’exercices élève en français et en mathématiques, ainsi que les guides enseignants.” – We must evaluate the system, we must evaluate the protocol. Two months after the start of the school year, the World Bank sends an independent verifier to check two things: that all teachers have been trained in implementing the programme, and that all teachers have access to the materials, namely the textbook, the student exercise books in French and mathematics, and the teacher guides.
This external verification is linked directly to financial disbursement, creating a consequence that focuses minds at every level of the system. Accountability works best when it is built into the financing architecture of a programme from the start, rather than added as an evaluation afterthought.
Prof. Haruna Musa, Executive Chairman of the Jigawa State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) in Nigeria, offered a striking practitioner’s perspective on this. Appointed in 2023 with a background in electrical engineering rather than education, he brought an outsider’s diagnostic rigour to a system in crisis and made system accountability the cornerstone of his approach:
“We are able to build a system which is simple, but obviously ambitious. The goal? Improving learning outcomes, while we are trying to expand access, equity, and system accountability. And this is actually what I really focus on.”
His account was a reminder that accountability is a leadership choice. The decision to hold the system to a clear, measurable goal, and to organise resources around that goal rather than around activities, is ultimately a political act that requires both courage and conviction from those in charge.
3. Teacher support must be sustained, not episodic
No theme generated more discussion across the three days than teacher support, and for good reason. Teachers are the last mile of any foundational learning strategy. Whatever is agreed in ministry buildings or conference rooms must ultimately be translated into changed classroom practice by individual teachers, many of whom are working in challenging conditions with limited resources and inconsistent supervision. Madame Doukouré Nurudine was unambiguous about what this requires:
“Il faut que l’enseignant se sente accompagné. Il faut qu’il se sente guidé, il faut qu’il se sente soutenu. La motivation est fondamentale pour la réussite, donc l’accompagnement est important, le suivi est important.” – The teacher must feel supported. They must feel guided, they must feel backed. Motivation is fundamental to success, so accompaniment matters, follow-up matters.
PNAPAS addresses this through a cascade training model that places the pedagogical advisor, rather than the teacher, as the primary unit of training investment. As Madame Doukouré Nurudine explained:
“Nous ne formons pas directement les enseignants. C’est le conseiller que nous formons, et lui à son tour va former l’enseignant. L’avantage de cette approche, c’est qu’elle facilite le suivi, ce sont les services qui doivent s’assurer que le programme est mis en œuvre.” – We do not train teachers directly. We train the pedagogical advisors, and they in turn train the teachers. The advantage of this approach is that it facilitates follow-up, as the very people responsible for ensuring the programme is implemented are the ones doing the training.
She was equally candid about the persistent challenge of teacher mobility, a systemic issue in which trained teachers are transferred between schools, disrupting implementation at the classroom level. PNAPAS has responded by introducing peer learning communities at the school level, monthly pedagogical review days, and a hybrid online and in-person training architecture designed to reduce the cost and logistical burden of continuous professional development. Sustained teacher support is the engine of results.
4. Financing requires a long-term strategy, not a short-term plan
The financing discussions surfaced a tension that every country delegation recognised: the ambition of foundational learning strategies routinely exceeds the domestic resources available to fund them, creating a dependence on external financing that introduces its own vulnerabilities. Donor priorities shift. Grant cycles end. External verification requirements create tight contractual timelines that can distort implementation planning. The delegation also dove into the accountability pressures that come with results-based financing.
The broader conference discussion pointed toward a model of progressive domestication: governments begin with significant external financing, use that period to demonstrate results and build institutional capacity, and gradually increase their domestic share while reducing external dependence. This requires long-term planning horizons, honest conversations with finance ministries about recurrent cost projections, and donor partnerships explicitly oriented toward transition rather than perpetuation.
Prof. Haruna Musa’s experience in Jigawa State, Nigeria, illustrated what this looks like in practice. Faced with donor support that was substantial but incomplete, covering some schools but not nearly all of the 3,200 in the state, he made a deliberate turn toward homegrown solutions:
“Development partners are offering to support us at their own cost. But based on what we are seeing, this may not be enough, they are not covering everywhere. We have over 3,200 schools. So I have to think about homegrown solutions.”
His approach, scanning the system first, identifying what was already working, and building domestically financed programmes around those foundations, represents exactly the kind of long-term financing logic the conference was advocating:
“The first thing I did was to scan the system. What is working well? What is preventing learners from learning? Where do I focus resources? Resources are limited. Needs are unlimited. So I must find something to do with the resources.”
Tanzania’s strategy added a further dimension: investing in prevention from the earliest years is more cost-efficient than remediating learning gaps later. As Mussa Julius Swila explained:
“All these pillars aim to make sure that prevention is more sustainable than remediating during implementation. When we invest a lot in preventive education, and the problems related to foundational learning are caught right from pre-primary, if that is not well-captured and well-maintained, it may lead to future challenges.”
Malawi’s experience offered a practical model for how this balance between domestic and external financing can be structured. Joyce Saukila described an approach built on a clear sequencing principle: government commits first, and partners follow its lead.
“It is co-funding. The Malawi government puts in money, and the donor partners add more. But the government moves first. They get the mandate to move first, and then the others match. So if they move well, the partners add more.”
Ethiopia’s Oromia region took perhaps the boldest financing position of the conference, describing a decision to mobilise government resources without waiting for external support:
“We introduced TaRL by our own. No support from anybody. It is the government who introduced TaRL for the system to overcome this problem. In Ethiopia, we managed to invest 500 million Ethiopian Birr. We paused other activities and devoted our energy, our finance, everything to the implementation of TaRL.”
— Bultossa Hirko Lebeta, Deputy Head, Oromia Education Bureau, Ethiopia
5. Institutionalisation is the ultimate goal
The final and perhaps most important theme was institutionalisation, the process by which a programme becomes a policy, a policy becomes a system, and a system becomes sufficiently embedded that it can survive systemic transitions such as changes of government and changes of donor. Strategies reflected in legislation, integrated into curriculum frameworks, and protected by budget lines are the ones most likely to outlast any single political moment.
Madame Doukouré Nurudine returned to this theme in her closing reflections, articulating a vision that extends beyond programme implementation:
“L’amélioration des apprentissages demande une vision systémique. La pédagogie seule ne peut pas faire le travail. Il faut que toutes les autres parties prenantes soient engagées, soient mises à contribution. Il faut qu’il y ait vraiment un travail d’équipe, un esprit d’équipe.” – Improving learning requires a systemic vision. Pedagogy alone cannot do the work. All other stakeholders must be engaged and mobilised. There must be genuine teamwork, a true team spirit.
She closed with words that captured the moral weight behind the technical work:
“Le PNAPAS, ce ne sont pas simplement des compétences scolaires. Ce sont des compétences de vie. Un adulte qui ne sait pas lire, qui ne sait pas compter, qu’est-ce qu’il devient ? Nous avons une obligation d’atteindre cet objectif-là.” – PNAPAS goes beyond academic skills. These are life skills. An adult who cannot read, who cannot count, what becomes of them? We have an obligation to achieve this goal.
Institutionalisation, at its core, is a moral commitment made durable through the structures, systems, and relationships that give it staying power across time.
Looking Ahead
These strategic discussions offered something rare in international education discourse: a space where governments spoke directly to one another, without the mediation of implementing partners or donor narratives, about what has actually worked, what has failed, and what they are still figuring out. The candour was striking. So was the generosity, with country after country sharing lessons learned at considerable cost, in the hope that peers might navigate similar challenges more effectively.
Amos Dembélé, TaRL Africa’s Country Director for Côte d’Ivoire, captured the spirit of the gathering:
“Cette conférence se veut être une opportunité majeure pour analyser les défis et consolider leurs systèmes éducatifs respectifs.”
— This conference is intended to be a major opportunity to analyse the challenges and consolidate their respective education systems.
TaRL Africa is grateful to the Government of Côte d’Ivoire and MENAET for their exceptional hospitality and openness in hosting this gathering, and to all nine delegations whose participation made the week what it was. The conversations that began in Grand-Bassam will continue as an ongoing exchange between countries, as governments across sub-Saharan Africa continue to work towards mitigating the foundational learning crisis across the continent.
The learning is ongoing. And so is the commitment.
As covered by: AfrikMonde — “Apprentissage fondamental : Huit (8) pays à l’école du partenariat entre la Côte d’Ivoire et TaRL Africa” (16 juin 2026, Paul ÉLIE) https://afrikmonde.com/apprentissage-fondamental-huit-8-pays-a-lecole-du-partenariat-entre-la-cote-divoire-et-tarl-africa/
