Thank you Teachers!

Published on Monday, 6 October 2014

As we celebrate World Teachers Day, let us be reminded of the importance of the challenges faced globally and in Africa in this area.  

Teachers are the cornerstone of any education system.

Today however, teachers are lacking.  And the numbers  are daunting:

  • 1.4 million new teaching posts are required to meet UPE by 2015;
  • 2.6 million teachers need to be replaced by 2015;
  • In all, 4 milliion teachers are needed by 2015.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest need for additional primary teachers by 2015. It needs 0.9 million additional teachers, i.e. 63% of the world total. Worldwide, four out of the five countries which need to create the most teaching posts by 2015 are African. They include: Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda and Tanzania.
Bearing this in mind, ADEA

  • Is encouraging the use of ICTs to increase access to, and improve the quality of education. Its dedicated Task Force on ICT facilitates the sharing of country experiences and the development of policies to integrate ICTs in education and training.
  • Is also stressing the importance of maths and science education. Its Inter-Cpuntry Quality Node (ICQN) focuses on the training of teachers in MSE.
  • Is a member of the International Task Force on Teachers for EFA. (PACTED) and collaborates with the Commonwealth Secretariat on Teacher issues.
  • It also works with Education International (EI) to implement the Bamako + 5 Declaration on Contract teachers.

ADEA’s global agenda for the next few years is also focused on assisting Ministries of Education to conduct reforms that will contribute to imparting the knowledge, skills and competencies to usher Africa on the path to sustainable development. This ambitious program – endorsed by the Heads of State of the African Union in 2013 – requires redesigning the curriculums, and more importantly revisiting the type of qualifications, skills and know-how for the 21st Century that African teachers and trainers should possess.

Since its inception in the late 1980s, the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) has made the teaching profession an essential component of its strategy to promote educational development in Africa. It established a Working Group in 1989 that has conducted advocacy, capacity building and research activities to address teacher management issues ranging from recruiting, training and managing teachers to their career development and working and living conditions. The ADEA Working Group on the Teaching Profession has sought to contribute to the development of sound teacher education and teacher development policies and strategies on the continent. In the 1990s, its Teacher Management Support (TMS) program was instrumental in structuring many African countries’ response to international development frameworks, specifically, the Education for All (EFA) and the education-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) through the teaching profession.

In the early 2000s ,ADEA  also tackled the phenomenon of contract-teachers, initially a stopgap measure brought about by the need to achieve UPE within the EFA framework, which has become the norm in many African countries. The Associations’ two “Bamako Conferences” in 2004 and 2009 (Bamako+5) drew attention to the challenges and threats that this category of teachers poses to the quality of education systems and proposed a roadmap and policy frameworks to address them.

It also fought against the stigmatization of teachers living with HIV/AIDS and produced a video which has been widely circulated among education policy-makers, practitioners, and stakeholders (Kenya: The Teaching Profession united in the fight against HIV/AIDS - ADEA Channel on YouTube).