Educators choose access over quality

from The East African

MIDWAY TO THE MILLENnium Development Goals set in 2000, several West African countries have made vast efforts to achieve universal education and gender parity in primary schools by 2015.

But education officials and teachers’ unions say the push for increased access to education has come at a cost.

“Right now, governments are making a lot of effort on quantity and not quality,” Victorine Djitrinou, international education, advocacy and campaign co-ordinator for Action Aid International, said at a recent conference on violence against schoolgirls held in Saly, Senegal.

While enrolment numbers have improved, retention and graduation rates remain a serious problem and, in some cases, have even decreased.

Officials in many West African countries say tens of thousands of unqualified teachers have a lot to do with it.

Pushed by the international community to increase enrolment, but limited by World Bank and International Monetary Fund programmes to cut costs, many West African countries hired teachers en masse, but reduced salaries and training, Education Ministry officials, teachers and aid workers told the media.

“We wanted to increase supply. It was urgent,” said Marie-Claire Guigma Nassa, of the Ministry of Basic Education and Literacy in Burkina Faso, where new recruits began being hired on contract instead of as tenured civil servants. Why? “It’s the donors who know why? They hold the loans. We’re more or less obliged.”

In Senegal, teachers’ training has been reduced from four years to six months, and in some cases, does not even exist. “Teachers are put directly into the classroom,” and trained during the holidays, said Alpha Oumar Diallo, secretary-general of the Union of Professors of Senegal.

IN GUINEA, “WE RECRUIT PEANUT vendors and woodworkers as teachers,” said Louis M’Bemba Soumah, secretary-general of the Union of Teachers and Researchers in Guinea. “It has completely screwed up the education system.”

In the early 1990s, when the World Bank introduced structural adjustment programmes in Mali, all teachers’ colleges were shut down, union and UN sources said.

In many francophone West African countries, some teachers barely speak French. Others are the same age as their students.

In many countries, contract teachers are the core of the education system, far outnumbering staff hired on civil servant conditions.

Teachers’ unions say improperly trained teachers not only provide a poorer education, but are also more likely to violate the rights of students, especially girls, as they lack ethics training.

Badly paid and often lacking a sense of pride in their profession, they are more open to corruption, education experts say.