Decree n° 2025-197: A missed opportunity to rethink TVET in Benin?
The decree n°2025-197 of April 23, 2025, enacted by President Patrice Talon, was intended to be a structuring milestone for the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) reform in Benin. Presented as a modernization and governance text, it nevertheless raises many questions about its real scope and ability to deeply transform the education system.
SUMMARY
The text sets the direction for the overall operation of public technical training institutions, from their creation to dissolution, including governance, missions, administrative and financial management, and coordination with economic, social, and territorial actors. It emphasizes pedagogical, administrative, and financial autonomy, and institutes a dense institutional framework revolving around a board of directors, a management council, a steering committee, and a pedagogical council.
Formally, the decree also introduces accountability mechanisms, performance monitoring through target contracts, and participation of various actors – enterprises, communities, chambers of commerce – in steering processes.
Despite this display, analysis of the system shows a major contradiction, that of decision-making power centralization. The appointment of school principals by decree in the Council of Ministers, on the proposal of the supervising minister, after a call for applications, demonstrates this wish for administrative lockdown. Although presented as open and merit-based, the process seems hardly compatible with school management depoliticization standards applied elsewhere, particularly in English-speaking countries where school principals’ promotions are governed by career plans based on seniority, teaching performance, and leadership.
The call for applications, in the absence of strong institutional guarantees on the transparency of selections, could become a tool for formal legitimization of previously determined political decisions. In this context, the notion of advertised autonomy seems more theoretical than real.
A persisting weakness of the pedagogical dimension
Another point of concern is the secondary place given to pedagogy. While the text mentions pedagogical autonomy, it remains silent on the essentials of a high-performing system that are rigorous initial training, continuous teacher assessment, teaching certifications, specialization paths. No national strategy for teachers’ capacity-building is defined. However, in the most advanced African countries in terms of TVET – Morocco, Egypt, Rwanda, or Ghana – the principals come from a pool of trained, evaluated, then selected teachers for their ability to manage institutions based on their actual performance.
The Benin decree sets no objective criteria for assignment or ranking of institutions according to their pedagogical output, their insertion rate or their economic impact. There is a real risk of seeing educational governance be reduced to a series of political appointments without a direct connection to the demands on the ground.
Also, the asserted objectives of following up on professional integration are not accompanied by a clear measurement mechanism. Neither performance indicators, nor alumni tracking system, nor numerical commitments in terms of integration are included in the decree. There is also no plan for public ranking of institutions based on their results or their contribution to the job market.
This lack of requirement for results is likely to harm the system’s efficiency, contrary to the inspiring experiences conducted in several African countries where institutions are evaluated based on measurable indicators (employment at six months, feedback from partner companies, satisfaction rate of graduates…).
Finally, although the decree discusses the mobilization of own resources (production, partnerships, ongoing training), it does not specify the financial bootstrapping mechanisms allowing institutions to meet such ambition. In the absence of significant structural support from the state or partners, the institutions could be placed in double jeopardy: having to produce more with less, while being held to performance obligations that are hard to meet.
A missed opportunity to rethink TVET?
Decree n°2025-197, although heralding a desire for reform, appears to suffer from an excess of technicality, an overly vertical governance, and a lack of pedagogical vision. It could have been the opportunity to lay the foundations for a TVET system based on merit, transparency, and results. Instead, it perpetuates a centralized model, where form triumphs over substance.
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