Teacher, Child, and Caretaker Surveys from the Modern Daaras Impact Evaluation 2016: Baseline Survey (Senegal)

Abstract

To support national goals of educational access and equity, Senegal has launched PAQEEB 2013-2017 (Projet d’Amelioration de la Qualité et de l’Equité dans l’Education de Base), which is a comprehensive government strategic plan to improve school governance, as well as increase equity and access to formal education. This is a collaborative effort of the Ministry of Education (MoE) of Senegal, the World Bank (WB), and other International agencies to improve the quality and equity of basic education (World Bank, 2013).
A sub-component of this wide initiative is the objective to reach children who do not typically access formal education and are enrolled in religious education in Koranic schools known as Daaras. With Muslims comprising around 95% of the Senegalese population, a vast majority of Senegalese males would have attended Daaras at one time or another, and it is estimated that between 800,000 and one million children and youth attend Daaras (D’Aoust, 2013; as cited in Goensch, 2016). In Senegal, a “Traditional Daara” is dedicated only to memorization of the Koran and advanced studies (Islamic law, etc.) and do not offer any additional instruction in science, math, French or other core courses under the official curriculum. “Modern Daaras”, on the other hand, train students not only in religious education like memorization of Koran but also in Math and French as per the official curriculum.

This subcomponent of the PAQEEB project aims to upgrade and improve Traditional Daaras to have language and math curricula like the Modern Daaras. This is an innovative intervention that provides pedagogical support through disbursement of “grants for results.” In return for this funding, project schools commit to perform the following activities: (1) to implement the specific “Modern Daaras” math and French curriculum; and (2) to ensure that students achieve learning results as reported through indicators measuring their levels of proficiency in reading and mathematics. The project stakeholders selected 100 Daaras in 20 counties based on the lowest gross enrollment ratios out of the 46 counties in Senegal (effectively, counties with gross enrollment ratios between 29 percent and 69 percent) to pilot the Daara modernization efforts (Bureau des Statistiques Scolaires et Universitaires, 2007).

This survey was used to evaluate this sub-component of the larger PAQEEB project that provides “grants for results” to selected Daaras. The survey consists of three distinct instruments that collected relevant data from teachers, caretakers of students, and students.