Providing Quality Education When Resources are Scarce: Strategies for Increasing Primary School Effectiveness in Burundi*

While a great deal of attention has been given to documenting the poor quality of African primary schools and the need to improve them (World Bank, 1988), the supporting evidence is often drawn either from international studies of educational achievement or from national research which uses a metropolitan language to measure achievement. African students, it seems, have not learned very much at primary school or even in secondary schools which select students on the basis of rigorous national examinations that are generally administered in a metropolitan language.