30 anos da Convenção sobre os Direitos da Criança. Foto: UNICEF | Dejongh.
The Government of Côte d’Ivoire has demonstrated its strong political will to invest in Education, by adopting not only a law on compulsory education for children aged 6 to 16 but also developing an Education Sector Plan from 2016 to 2025.

Efforts undertaken by the Government, with the support of partners, including UNICEF, have reduced the number of out-of-school children aged 6 to 15 in Côte d’Ivoire from 2 million in 2015 to 1.6 million in 2017. Among them, a number of children are enrolled either in Islamic schools (“Medersa, Franco Arabes and Koranic schools”) or in community schools that are not registered with the Ministry of Education. In 2018, UNICEF Côte d’Ivoire supported the Ministry of Education in conducting a GPS mapping exercise of Islamic schools, which identified 2,402 Islamic schools nationwide hosting 316,691 pupils, including 139,595 girls (44%), and will help develop an approach for a national integration strategy of the Islamic schools into the formal system.

For every child, education.