Promises have been made, and broken, about every child’s right to primary education by 2015. Yet, just months away from the deadline, a new policy paper released on World Teachers' Day by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the EFA Global Monitoring Report shows that the global demand for teachers will soar from 4 million in 2015 to 27 million by 2030. This demand for new teachers is both to keep up with growing school populations and to make up for teachers who are leaving the profession each year. In the race to fill these gaps, many countries are throwing learning into question by hiring teachers with little or no training.
More teachers needed for growing populations
A closer look at the data reveals the depth of the crisis and suggests ways to alleviate it. The new UIS eAtlas of teachers presents interactive maps and charts highlighting countries with the biggest shortages, and shows when they might close the gaps if current trends continue. Clearly, sub-Saharan Africa needs the most new teachers. Despite steady growth in primary enrollment rates over the past 20 years, about 30 million children between the ages of 6 and 11 are still excluded from school and most will probably never set foot in a classroom. There are many reasons for their exclusion, with poverty and conflict topping the list. But, how can countries begin to get children into school, and how will they promote student learning, without a sufficient supply of trained teachers?
Today, classrooms are overflowing with students hungry for the chance to learn.
The situation in Africa will likely worsen due to steady growth in the school-age population: for every 100 children of school age today, there will be 147 children in 2030. As a result, the region must not only fill almost 4 million vacant posts by 2030 but also create 2.3 million new teaching positions.
Financing teacher recruitment
How much will it cost to hire these new teachers? According to UIS projections, the region must direct an extra US$5.2 billion per year to cover the salary costs of the additional teachers required by 2020. 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 expand their teaching forces if they continue the current trend to increase investment in education.
Over the past decade, education budgets across sub-Saharan Africa have been growing by 7% adjusted for inflation. However, four countries will need to significantly increase their education budgets if they are to cover the bills: the Central African Republic, Chad, Malawi and Mali.
Teachers need to be trained
But money alone will not close the teacher gap or improve learning. Today, about 250 million children lack the most basic reading and numeracy skills even though many have spent four years in school. To improve education quality, we must invest in teachers. However, the pressure to enroll more children in school has led many countries to recruit untrained teachers. For example, less than 50% of teachers in classrooms meet national training requirements in Angola, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and South Sudan, according to UIS data. Globally, less than 75% of teachers are trained in one-third of countries. As a result, the challenge of training teachers in some countries looms far larger than the challenge of hiring new people to the profession.
Ultimately, countries in the region face a double challenge: they must boost recruitment of trained teachers while training those already in classrooms. Yet many governments do not have the policies or resources to do both. Let’s be clear – this is not a small undertaking. It is generally agreed that teachers should have at least a secondary education. However, the EFA Global Monitoring Report shows that these graduates are in short supply: one out of every 10 secondary school graduates would have to join the profession to produce enough teachers in Burkina Faso, Mali and Mozambique by 2020, for example.
Teachers know better than anyone how much of a challenge it can be teaching large classes, especially without training. This is why the EFA Global Monitoring Report has launched an Advocacy Toolkit for Teachers to help lobby their governments for gaps to be filled and for adequate training to be provided for new and existing teachers. The kit has been produced in partnership with UNESCO’s Teacher Taskforce for EFA and Education International. Please share this resource and the eAtlas with your networks. To ensure that policy makers provide a quality education, by increasing the numbers of providing children trained teachers, requires a broad collaborative effort on many different fronts.