What this concours is
Chad’s entry route into its senior civil service is a single, nationwide written and oral competition run by one institution, the Concours d’Entree a l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA-Tchad), rather than a scatter of ministry-by-ministry hiring notices. The Ecole Nationale d’Administration, based in N’Djamena, was created on 20 May 1963 and marked its sixtieth anniversary in December 2023, a six-decade track record rather than a mechanism still proving itself; the school is credited with having trained close to 3,000 cadres of the Chadian administration over that time. One order from the Ministere de l’Enseignement Superieur opens the whole competition each cycle, covering both the external track (open degree holders) and the internal track (serving civil servants) at once, one written exam held on the same day at every centre nationwide, and one combined national result published by name. This is the same single- administration shape this site has documented for Mali’s general civil- service concours and for the DRC’s ENA-RDC, and the opposite of the fragmented, ministry-by-ministry competitions ruled out in Senegal, Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, Niger and Guinea’s general concours.
Whether this exam keeps running through Chad’s political transition
Chad’s recent political history is relevant to ask about directly. President Idriss Deby died in April 2021 while visiting troops at the front, and a military transitional council led by his son, Mahamat Idriss Deby, governed the country for three years before a 2024 constitutional referendum and presidential election formally opened Chad’s “Fifth Republic,” with Mahamat Idriss Deby elected president. The ENA concours ran through that whole transition rather than pausing for it: a 2021-2022 cycle is documented with a published provisional candidate list that year, during the transitional council’s first year in power, and the school’s sixtieth-anniversary celebration in December 2023 fell squarely inside the transition period too. The November 2025 session covered on this page is described by Chadian press as the first ENA concours organised under the Fifth Republic specifically, which marks a change in constitutional era, not a change in whether the school or its concours exists; the institution and its annual intake predate the new Republic by six decades.
How the concours actually runs
Each annual cycle opens with an order (an Arrete) from the Ministere de l’Enseignement Superieur, de la Recherche Scientifique et de la Formation Professionnelle, announced publicly by the ENA’s Director General, setting the application window, the eligibility rules and the specialisations open that year. Two tracks are opened by the same order: an external track for degree holders and an internal track for serving civil servants. Candidates declare whether they will sit the written test in French or Arabic. The written admissibility test is then held on the same day at every exam centre nationwide; for the 2025-2026 cycle that meant 12 centres, five in N’Djamena and seven across the provincial capitals of Abeche, Bongor, Faya, Mao, Mongo, Moundou and Sarh. After marking, the ENA publishes the list of candidates declared admissible, who are then interviewed by the jury in N’Djamena on their aptitude, motivation and personality. The final admission list is published by name shortly after, and admitted candidates begin training across the ENA’s programmes, grouped into four career categories: financial and economic, administrative and social affairs, diplomatic and consular, and territorial studies.
Who is eligible
External candidates need Chadian nationality, a bachelor’s degree (licence) or an equivalent diploma, and must be 40 years old or younger at the date set by that session’s opening order. Internal candidates must already be serving civil servants classified at a minimum in category B, 2nd class or equivalent, with at least five years of seniority in that category, and must be 50 years old or younger at the same reference date. There is no separate physical test, typing test or medical exam; the written admissibility test and the oral interview are the only two stages.
Scale
The 2025-2026 cycle is sourced cleanly and consistently across Chadian press coverage, from the opening announcement through to the final results, all describing the same single national session rather than a figure stitched together from unrelated competitions. The Director General announced the opening of the 2025-2026 normal-cycle concours (Arrete n. 3895) on 24 June 2025. The written admissibility test was held nationwide on 19 October 2025, drawing 11,338 registered candidates in total: 10,575 external candidates (93 percent) and 763 internal candidates (7 percent); 9,365 candidates (83 percent) sat the test in French and 1,973 (17 percent) in Arabic. After marking, the admissibility list published on 30 October 2025 declared 1,455 candidates admissible, a 12.83 percent pass rate. Those 1,455 candidates were interviewed by the jury on 3 and 4 November 2025. The jury president proclaimed the final results on 6 November 2025: 350 candidates definitively admitted out of the 11,338 who had registered, a session Chadian press specifically flagged as the first ENA concours organised under Chad’s Fifth Republic. The same institution, the same written-then-oral structure and a provisional candidate list for an earlier 2021-2022 cycle together show this is a recurring annual mechanism with decades behind it, not a single well-documented cycle standing in for a longer history this research could not otherwise confirm.
What this page does not yet cover
This page covers the ENA-Tchad entrance concours specifically, the one mechanism found in this research with a genuine written exam, a single coordinated national session, and sourced current-cycle scale. Two other mechanisms were checked and are not covered here. Chad’s general “concours de la fonction publique,” run case by case under the Ministere de la Fonction Publique et du Travail, has a real presidential commitment behind it (a stated goal of recruiting 5,000 young people into the civil service, folded into the 2026 Finance Law), but no sourced single national session or combined candidate count was found for it in this research, the same fragmentation that ruled out the general concours checked in Senegal, Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea and the DRC. Teacher recruitment was also checked: the Ministere de l’Education Nationale et de la Promotion Civique’s 2025-2026 selection test for 3,100 “community teacher” (enseignant communautaire) positions, open to BEPC/BEF holders with an MC1 training certificate, is a genuine competitive selection run across Chad’s 23 provincial capitals, but it is a lower-tier contract-teacher screening distinct from the ENA concours, and no combined national candidate count for it was found in this research, so it is not filed as its own page here.