Burkina Faso sits near the bottom of every development index that exists. Ranked 184th out of 191 countries in the UNDP Human Development Index, with a GDP per capita of roughly $764 a year. Two in five people live below the national poverty line, and ninety percent of the poor live in rural areas. More than eighty percent of the population relies on subsistence agriculture.
These are not statistics about a country that has been unlucky. They are statistics about a country that was deliberately kept poor. France administered what is now Burkina Faso as Upper Volta from 1919 until independence in 1960. A system built for extraction does not become a system built for development simply because the flag changes.
Approximately three million children are enrolled in primary education. Seventy-four percent cannot read an age-appropriate text by the age of ten. Seventy-two percent of young people between fifteen and twenty-four have not completed primary education. By law, education is free and compulsory from age six to sixteen. In practice, communities are frequently responsible for constructing their own school buildings.
Mathematics is not a priority in a system fighting to achieve basic literacy. It should be. Numeracy is the foundation of economic participation. A population that cannot calculate cannot negotiate, cannot trade, cannot build. The gap between what children in Burkina Faso are taught and what they need to know is not a gap that will close on its own.
The Foundation is working with a local NGO partner to deploy MathAccel across three hundred primary schools in Burkina Faso. The platform is available in French, requires no prior diagnostic infrastructure, and identifies precisely where each student is — delivering instruction calibrated to that point and tracking progress in real time. Three hundred schools. Tens of thousands of students.