Today, I have the honor of addressing the 7th Education International World Congress in Ottawa. Education International is the world’s largest federation of unions, representing 30 million education employees in 400 organizations in 170 countries and territories around the world.

I am here today on behalf of the Global Partnership for Education, an organization in which teachers are represented on its Board of Directors, as well as in policy and planning discussions at the country-level. The Global Partnership for Education has been built solidly on principles of development effectiveness that respect the governments of our developing country partners as the drivers of their own development. They lead and own the process of developing their own education systems based on solid education sector plans – while donors, international organizations, the GPE Fund, teacher organizations, civil society organizations and others – support and enable the national system to deliver.

Actions that a government and its partners take in education greatly impact the work of teachers. Teachers are at the frontlines of the movement to achieve quality education for all every single day. That is why their engagement in the policy and planning process is critical. Their insights, experiences, and needs must be central considerations to charting the roadmap for achieving education goals.

When I travelled to South Sudan last year, I visited a government school and met with students and teachers there. I went to the classroom in that school and I saw a hundred children and a single teacher who was struggling. The children had no books. They did have a black board. The room was filled with over one hundred children of different ages and abilities who were barely focusing. That teacher standing before that class reminded me of what I see in many schools - heroism.  Faced with what seemed like insurmountable challenges, he was still trying to teach.

What many teachers do is remarkable. But it shouldn’t have to be so. It should be normal and universal. Education should be available to every child in every village. To every poor child in every village, and not just the privileged few. That’s our goal.

Engaging with teachers to ensure quality and equity

Over the past 15 years, we’ve learned that getting children through the classroom door is not enough. Ensuring that they are learning is the critical piece, and more teachers and better teaching lie at the heart of any solution to the learning crisis.

Furthermore, recent data show that to achieve universal primary education by 2030, 27.3 million new teachers need to be recruited. In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 7 in 10 countries are faced with an acute shortage of teachers. In the Central African Republic, for example, the student to teacher ratio in primary schools is 80:1, that number rises to 138:1 when considering the ratio of students to trained teachers.

To promote better learning and address teacher shortage the Global Partnership for Education has prioritized investments in teachers. In fact, close to 60% of GPE partner countries have established teacher development programs and GPE grants have been used to provide nearly US$425 million to directly support teacher salaries and incentives, the construction of teacher training centers, and teacher training activities.

Teacher organizations have their own seat on the constituency-based Board, currently filled by colleagues from Syndicat des Professeurs du Senegal (SYPROS) and Education International. In addition, the GPE Secretariat participates in the EFA Teacher Task Force, which provides advocacy for teachers, policy dialogue and knowledge sharing and country support. GPE also provides funding that supports the engagement of teachers in national processes, and research into best practices in teaching and learning. The Global and Regional Activities (GRA) program funds a number of projects related to teachers including a $1.9 million grant that builds the capacity of teacher organizations to engage teachers in the education sector policy dialogue at country level. This grant looks to engage teachers in discussions around teaching effectiveness, quality of education, and the implementation of innovative approaches for teacher training.

Support to teachers and teacher organizations at the global level is essential to the success of Education for All but the rubber really hits the road in GPE partner developing countries.

In Cameroon, for example, a reduction of teacher salaries and a freeze on recruitment led to large class sizes and parents struggling to provide voluntary contributions to the salary of community-hired teachers. The situation was untenable. When Cameroon joined the Global Partnership in 2006, it came with a plan to address the teacher shortage.

A GPE grant to Cameroon was used solely to pay the salaries of teachers while the government significantly scaled-up recruitment. The results of this investment, along with other partners’ work and contributions, were a decrease in classroom sizes and repetition rates, an increase in girls’ enrollment and in primary completion overall. Furthermore, the new-found security of teacher salaries spilled over to make the teaching profession more attractive to new and ambitious recruits. Global Partnership support for this initiative had a catalytic effect on the government’s commitment to the teacher program, which is now a central component of the country’s education sector plan.

We believe so strongly in the role of teachers in achieving education goals that improving teachers’ effectiveness was one of five key objectives in our current strategic plan and we have proposed investing in teaching and learning as one of our new strategic goals for the period between 2016 and 2020.

Education 2030 and the role of teachers

Teachers must remain central to the discussions now taking place about the next iteration of global development goals. With a strong focus on quality learning and equity, achieving the new SDG on education will require a renewed commitment to the work of teachers.

It’s true that over the past 15 years huge gains have been made in access and gender equality at the primary level and we have much to be proud of. But many children are still left out.

The new post-2015 education agenda should challenge us to accept that no goal can be considered met, until it is met for all. Inequity, discrimination and barriers to education must be eliminated. Achieving equity in education will require a focus on access and learning outcomes, aimed at the hardest to reach children. This goal is about quality, and the quality of an education system cannot rise above the quality of the teachers that stand in the classroom. 

That struggling teacher in South Sudan also talked to me about the need for training and the aspirations that he had both for the quality of education he could provide to his students. Even in under the most challenging of circumstances he still understood that his students deserved a quality education, and he had ideas about how to achieve that goal. His voice must be heard.