New Data Collection Strategy

MENFP's revised strategy for collecting education data, covering not only the classical school census but the three sub-sectors usually left out of it: vocational training, non-formal education and literacy, and higher education, plus a digital library for unstructured data.

The diagnosis it starts from explains why a new strategy was needed. On a 2018 stocktaking, most preschool-age children and 90 percent of children of fundamental first and second cycle age (6 to 11) are in school; the net fundamental enrolment rate rose from about 68.10 percent in 2010-2011 to 77 percent in 2015-2016, and the gross secondary rate from 29 percent in 2011 to 44 percent in 2016. Those are real gains, and they sit alongside a literacy rate of 61.0 percent for the population aged 10 and over, higher for men (63.8 percent) than women (58.3 percent) and far better in urban than rural areas (80.5 against 47.1 percent), with every department including the Ouest below the regional average.

The document is candid about what the system cannot currently do: it notes the inability even to publish an estimate of the illiteracy rate in Haiti, which is the gap the collection strategy exists to close. It also records provision concentrated in ways a national figure hides, with the Artibonite and Grand'Anse alone holding nearly 70 percent of family education centres. Operationalization is set out sub-sector by sub-sector, so each has its own instrument and route rather than being appended to the school census.