JICA Internship in Burkina Faso

Hi, everyone. How are you? This is Kyohei Takeuchi, M1 guy. It is the 1st time to write. I hope all of you reading this blog have been very well. I actually started the intern in Burkina Faso at the beginning of August and finished it the other day, so this time I would like to briefly introduce and share my experience there.

SMASE (Strengthening Mathematics and Science Education) project, in which I participated, is JICA’s main educational cooperation in Africa which focuses on improving teachers’ teaching skill on mathematics and science education at primary school. Organizing 2 trainings at both national and local level, the project aims at diffusing the idea of JICA’s original pedagogical approach called ASEI-PDSI, which is based on student-centered approach. ASEI is an abbreviation of A (Activity), S (Student-centered), E (Experiment), and I (Improvisation). PDSI consists of 4 elements, each of which stands for P (Plan), D (Do), S (See), and I (Improve). In the training, various kinds of activities and teaching methods based on ASEI-PDSI are introduced. At national training, participants are educational advisors, local trainers, and inspectors who are in charge of local training or supervising GAP activity in their own districts. GAP is a section meeting for some school teachers to exchange and share pedagogical know-how. Those participating in a local training are the representatives of each GAP who are all the principals of each school. SMASE is a cascade project so participants are expected to fully understand and diffuse the contents introduced in both trainings to the GAP, and ultimately to the implementation of ASEI-PDSI approach in the classroom.

Through this 3 months internship, I was involved in various activities such as accounting, translation, making all kinds of document, arrangement for the trainings, class observation, interview and so on, all of which are important for carrying out a project. There are of course a lot of things I learned, but I particularly realized the importance of seeing a situation from different angles because there is usually a big perception gap among each stakeholder. Additionally, I found it very difficult to plan a saleable (売れる) project in terms of the quality of education for attracting donors. Overall, my internship in Burkina is not just quite instructive but also so much fun, especially because people are very nice!! So if you have time, I really recommend you to visit there!

By the way, if you are interested in details of SMASE project in Burkina or SMASSE (Strengthening of Mathematics and Science in Secondary Education) in other countries, please go to the following websites.

http://www.jica.go.jp/project/burkinafaso/0701501/
http://www.jica.go.jp/project/subject/education/01_1.html

Thanks and best regards!!

Kyohei Takeuchi