93 Countries face acute teacher shortage — UNESCO report
A new UNESCO policy paper, published on World Teachers Day 2014, has revealed that at least 93 countries have an acute teacher shortage, and need to recruit four million teachers to achieve universal primary education (UPE) by 2015.
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It said in a rush to fill the chronic, global shortage of teacher vacancies many countries were sacrificing standards and undermining progress by hiring people with little or no training.
Policy paper
The paper said sub-Saharan Africa faced the greatest teacher shortage, accounting for two-thirds of the number of teachers needed by 2030, adding that if the deadline to achieve universal primary education was extended to 2030, “more than 27 million teachers need to be hired.”
“At present rates, however, 28 (or 30 per cent) of these 93 countries will not meet these needs.”
According to Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, “A quality universal primary education will remain a distant dream for millions of children living in countries without enough trained teachers in classrooms.”
Situation in Ghana
In Ghana, while there had been a 61-per cent increase in the number of primary school teachers over the past decade, the percentage of trained teachers fell gradually from 72 per cent in 1999 to 53 per cent in 2013, it said.
The country needs to expand teacher recruitment by just 10 per cent per year to achieve UPE by 2020, while reducing its pupil-teacher ratio to 40:1.
“This is below its five per cent average annual growth rate of teachers since 1999. Yet, the number of existing teachers needing to be trained must grow by almost 10 per cent per year to ensure that there will be 40 pupils per trained teacher in 2020, down from 59:1 in 2013. This is well above the two per cent average growth rate of trained teachers since 1999,” it said.
Education system
The paper said under pressure to fill gaps, many countries were recruiting teachers who lacked the most basic training. In one-third of countries with data, fewer than 75 per cent of primary school teachers were trained according to national standards in 2012. In Angola, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and South Sudan, this figure falls below 50 per cent.
As a result, in roughly a third of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the GMR shows that the challenge of training existing teachers is greater than that of recruiting new teachers to the profession.
EFA Director
Mr Aaron Benavot, Director of Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report said, “We have prepared a new Advocacy Toolkit for teachers to help us relay these messages to their governments. Teachers, better than anyone else, can relay how teacher shortages and a lack of training are making it impossible to deliver quality education.”
The paper said countries must ensure that all new trainee teachers would acquire at least secondary education. The GMR showed that the numbers of those with this qualification in many countries were in short supply: Eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa would have to recruit at least five per cent of their secondary school graduates into the teaching force by 2020, it said.
Paying teachers
“In sub-Saharan Africa, the cost of paying the salaries of the additional teachers required by 2020 totals an extra US$5.2 billion per year before counting for training, learning materials and school buildings. With the greatest number of children out of school in the world, Nigeria alone will need to allocate an extra US$1.8 billion per year.”
“The good news is that most countries can afford to hire the extra teachers if they continue to steadily increase investment in education,” said Hendrik van der Pol, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
“Over the past decade, education budgets across sub-Saharan Africa have been growing by seven per cent in real terms, reflecting the commitment to get more teachers and children in classrooms.
“However, four countries: The Central African Republic, Mali, Chad and Malawi will need to significantly increase their education budgets if they are to cover the bills. All will need to cater for the costs of training these new recruits as well,” he said.