co-fundable projects

Working to improve teacher training in both the formal and non-formal educational sectors in Uganda and Mali.

the issue

Popular expectations about the right to education are no longer satisfied by increasing access to schooling. The public demands education that truly educates, and that requires quality educators. Every good teacher benefits an entire class, year after year, and when those better-educated pupils become parents they will likely demand a good education for their children.

In the two countries chosen for piloting this project, Uganda and Mali, numbers of children enrolled in primary school have rapidly increased. But learning outcomes lag behind – only around half of children successfully complete primary school, and many girls are still out of school – in part because of difficulties those countries face in recruiting and retaining good quality educators, in particular female educators who attract more girls to school for longer periods of time.

In Mali, more qualified teachers are needed – more than half of all primary school teachers have had no teacher training at all, and nearly 90% did not complete secondary school. In Uganda, the problem is more of internal regional distribution, with few qualified teachers wanting to locate in the north of the country, where a legacy of conflict and displacement affects both teachers and students.

the project

Activities on the project’s first phase began in both Uganda and Mali in 2010, to build stakeholder consensus around a "competency profile" – defining, in the first instance, the skills, knowledge and attitudes that a contemporary teacher needs, and drafting teacher training curricula to reflect this. This instrument is intended for use in non- formal and formal educational systems.

Additional funding is sought to support local institutions to use those curricula in training teachers, and advocacy to mainstream the project’s outputs in public services and institutions. There is a strong learning component enabling the formal sector to draw on successful methodologies of educating teachers from non-formal experiences.

Research into the effectiveness of different modalities of teacher training and of the obstacles that teachers face in their profession is planned for. Mechanisms will be devised for teachers to communicate about their jobs, potentially using new technologies and social media, and for teachers to network with peers, communities and local support systems.

Led by Oxfam Novib in conjunction with Education International, an umbrella body of education workers organized into unions, the Quality-ED project is designed to span both non-formal and formal education. It aims achieve systemic quality improvements in public services without leaving behind the hard-to-reach populations that NGOs generally serve.

The main country partners have been selected with this aim in mind: in Mali, the coalition of civil society groups working in education, COSC-EPT, and the teachers union SNEC; and in Uganda the Forum for African Women Educationalists, the trade union UNATU, and LABE – Literacy and Adult Basic Education – whose strength is in the North of the country.