ABSTRACT
The commitment of the international community in the 1990s to promote quality ‘education for all’ has engendered a new trend in ‘francophone’ Africa towards the experimentation of mother tongue first education in primary school (Halaoui 2005; Nikièma, forthcoming) in an environment where mother tongues (MTs) were forbidden from use in the school area. We focus here on the case of Burkina Faso where such experimentation gained momentum in the mid-1990s after a first short-lived attempt between 1979 and 1984. This chapter highlights the successes and the challenges to be met by the major experiment known as the MEBA-OSEO (Ministry of Basic Education and Literacy-Oeuvre Suisse d’entraide ouvrière/Swiss Labour Assistance) formula, drawing parallels where applicable, with the Ethiopian case described in Chapter 1 above.
