The Abidjan Principles: A bridge between law, policy and advocacy
In recent decades, as the privatisation in and of education has picked up pace, various courts, civil society organisations, and human rights groups, among others, have raised concerns around the implications of private actors’ involvement in the education sector. However, the lack of a cohesive interpretation of international law and a collective global response has made it challenging to turn these concerns into concrete actions.
Therefore, the Abidjan Principles (APs) have come as a landmark framework. They not only clarify the role and regulation of private actors in education, but also reaffirm the human rights obligations of states in the provision of education.
But what exactly are the Abidjan Principles? Why are they such a crucial turning point in the fight against the privatisation of education, and the fight for realising the right to education for all? And how can we use them in different contexts in education policy and practice?
Understanding the Abidjan Principles
The Abidjan Principles were adopted by 57 experts in international law and human rights in February 2019 in Côte d’Ivoire, following a three-year participatory consultation and drafting process. Many international organisations, such as the Right to Education Initiative, the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Amnesty International, the Equal Education Law Centre, among others , also supported the drafting and adoption of the Principles. Broadly, the APs are a set of guidelines on the human rights obligations of states to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education.
International and regional conventions, such as the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education of 1960, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) of 1966, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights of 1981, guarantee the right to free, inclusive, quality public education for all. However, differing national contexts and the constantly evolving role of private actors in education have made it difficult to interpret and apply these frameworks.
The debates around voucher systems in countries like Chile and the USA demonstrate this difficulty. While vouchers were initially framed as a way for states to reduce the burden on overstretched public education systems, in contexts like Chile’s, a long-standing national voucher model has shifted enrollment and funding into the private sector, leading to increased socio-economic stratification in public and private schools. In the United States, voucher programmes have been criticised for diverting public funds to private schools that are less accountable to taxpayers and also eroding the capacity of existing public school systems. Not only does this create a financing crisis for public schools, but, in the absence of clear regulatory frameworks, it also creates concerns around school segregation, discrimination and student selection.
It is precisely these kinds of policy ambiguities and regulatory gaps that the Abidjan Principles hope to address. Rather than creating new legal obligations, the Abidjan Principles consolidate and interpret existing international and regional norms. This has created a coherent framework on the responsibilities and duties of States to their people, which is applicable in contemporary education systems. They comprise a total of 97 guiding principles on the human rights obligations of states in the provision of education and regulation of private involvement; they also contain 10 overarching principles that provide both an overview and the main basis of the guiding principles.
These principles categorically lay out that states are both responsible for the provision of free, quality, inclusive public education to all those in their jurisdictions, and for regulating the involvement of private actors in education to ensure their compliance with human rights standards. Implicit within the Principles is also an understanding that education systems operate within unequal economic, social and political contexts, and if left unregulated, they can undermine the right to education.
In this situation, the Abidjan Principles affirm public education as the central mechanism through which states must fulfil the right to education. Additionally, the Principles emphasise that education systems must be evaluated not just with regard to access, but also in relation to their effects on quality, discrimination and social segregation.
Accountability through the Abidjan Principles
The Abidjan Principles are designed in such a way that they provide a shared language for accountability to courts, national human rights institutions, UN bodies, civil society organisations and others. This language for accountability has turned the Principles from a theoretical concept to a mechanism through which civil society organisations can push back against privatisation in education while also compelling states to fulfil their obligations in the provision of education.
The example of the Abidjan Principles in practice in Brazil shows how they can be used to advocate for stronger regulation of private actors.
The Principles have also been utilised in Nepal by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Specifically, the ICJ has used the Principles by training Nepali lawyers on the right to education.
In Kenya, EACHRights has used them in its work with the Ministry of Education to train officials on the responsibilities of duty bearers in upholding the right to education while also inculcating a human rights perspective in their work.
In 2023, Farida Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, referenced the Principles to emphasise the need for states to establish and implement the minimum standards for private actors in education.
Many more examples of how the Abidjan Principles are being referenced and utilised across the world can be found on the official website. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how these Principles not only serve as a normative reference but also as an actionable framework.
A new future for public education
While states have made some progress in universalising the right to education, concerns around equity of access, quality, and other issues remain unaddressed. These issues are compounded by governments’ frequent inability to regulate for-profit private actors. In many contexts, regulation is made more difficult because private actors are supported by powerful international organisations and actors, as part of the neoliberal reform agenda. And, even as civil society responds to the growth of private provision in education, these dynamics have wide-ranging implications for the future of public education itself.
The establishment and utilisation of a framework like the Abidjan Principles not only provides an effective bridge between law, policy and advocacy when addressing these challenges, but also attests to the strength of civil society action. While previous conventions guaranteed the right to education, the Principles have fully explained what exactly this right entails, who is responsible for its delivery and to what extent. In effect, the Abidjan Principles have significantly reshaped how civil society and other human-rights-based groups envision and fight for the future of public education.
Author: Rabia Najm Khan
Biography: Rabia is a Fellow at PEHRC and a student in the Erasmus Mundus Master’s program in Education Policies for Global Development (GLOBED). She previously worked with The Citizens Foundation (TCF) in Pakistan as a researcher, focusing on teacher well-being and students’ social-emotional learning in low-resource contexts. Her master’s thesis examines teachers’ experiences in public-private partnership (PPP) schools in Pakistan.
Views expressed in this blog are those of the author/s’ alone. Publication on this blog does not represent an endorsement by PEHRC of the opinions expressed.