Ouagadougou — Burkina Faso's government and education experts hope that the introduction of bilingual schools that teach pupils in both French and their mother tongue would increase school enrolment that are often as low as 12 percent in rural areas.

At the end of a three-day workshop in the capital, Ouagadougou, on "bilingual education in Burkina Faso" attended by 300 delegates, including some from Mali and Senegal, Burkina's minister for basic education and literacy, Mathieu Ouedraogo, said the government would create adequate conditions for extension of bilingual schools but would not "force people to accept it".

"Bilingual education is in line with the practical utility of the child in its environment... with manual activities and cultural aspects of life. That does not exist in the classic [mainstream] school," Ouedraogo said on Saturday.

The delegates, mainly education experts, called for the use of local and foreign languages in all primary schools in Burkina Faso. They called for a strategy to implement bilingual education in the country, where the main language of instruction in schools has been French.

"The fact that the school is using a language mastered by the child accelerates apprenticeship and makes easy the comprehension of what is taught," Paul Ilboudo, chairman of the Oeuvre Suisse d'Entraide Ouvrière, an NGO supporting bilingual education said.

Since its experimental phase in 1994, 60 schools have implemented bilingual education in 19 of Burkina's 45 provinces. Statistics show 85.2 percent of children at primary six in bilingual schools pass their primary school certificate compared to 61.81 percent in the classical schools. They sit for examination after five years instead of six.

Only 43 percent of Burkina's school age children attend school, of whom 58 percent reach secondary schools. In some areas, only 5-10 percent are girls. The authorities want to raise the national girl enrolment from 38 to 65 percent and last year, launched a 10-year US $346 million plan to raise the total enrolment to 70 percent of school going children by 2010.