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The world urgently needs to recruit more than 8 million extra teachers, according to UN estimates, warning that a looming shortage of primary school teachers threatens to undermine global efforts to ensure universal access to primary education by 2015.At least 2m new teaching positions will need to be created by 2015, the UN said in a report published this week. An additional 6.2 million teachers will need to be recruited to maintain current workforces and replace those expected to retire or leave classrooms due to career changes, illnesses, or death.

According to Unesco's projections, the greatest challenges lie in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 1m teaching posts will need to be created by 2015 to meet the needs of a growing number of primary students. Population growth and the push to get all children into school by 2015 has led enrolment rates to soar in many countries, but quality of education will remain a prime concern if countries fail to get enough teachers into classrooms. A total of 350,000 teachers should be hired in sub-Saharan Africa each year until 2015 to fill new posts and compensate for teachers expected to leave the workforce, said the report.

"In many regions a low proportion of female teachers will mean fewer girls at school and consequently even fewer women teachers in the future," said Unesco's director general, Irina Bokova, in a statement on Wednesday,

Shortages do not only concern developing countries. Although Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounts for more than half the demand, the United States, Spain, Ireland, Italy and Sweden are among the 112 countries suffering from the same problem.   Insufficient staffing to ensure universal primary education by 2015 affects the different regions as follows: Sub-Saharan Africa (1,115,000 teachers required), Arab States (-243,000 teachers), South and West Asia (-292,000), North America and Western Europe (-155,000). Central and Eastern Europe, Central and East Asia, Latin American and the Caribbean on the other hand together account for only 11 % of the global shortage of teachers required to meet the 2015 target for achieving universal primary education.   These figures, however, do not take into account the number of teachers leaving the profession for a variety of reasons such as retirement, illness, or career change. To meet the total shortage, 6.1 million teachers will be needed between 2009 and 2015.  

the Kenyan National Union of Teachers (KNUT), urged “the government to declare the shortage of teachers a national disaster,” reported the national newspaper Daily Nation.

“It is a serious disaster and parents and people of goodwill should join us in this mother of all strikes, he added. We cannot accept to have schools where 3.4 million children are receiving a half-baked education.”

Kenya has not increased its teacher stock since 1999 [...] Kenya has merely been replacing teachers lost due to attrition. As a result the country has 40,000 trained teachers roaming the streets.”

Zimbabwe: Deteriorating education system and political tensions have led to severe teacher shortage

Incentives that parents can pay to improve teachers’ salaries have become one of the most controversial issues facing the education unions of Zimbabwe. It is dividing teachers and has incapacitated access to education by the most vulnerable groups of our society, said ZIMTA President Tendai Chikowore in her opening address.

ZIMTA estimates that in the past decade more than 20,000 teachers have left the country. In 2009, according to Chikowore, 35% of the teacher posts in primary education and 33% in secondary education were vacant.She noted that “teachers' morale sank to its lowest ebb since independence” and that any form of support for the reconstruction of Zimbabwe should recognize the need for support to teachers.

The assessment, which was carried out last week, indicates that with the movement of an estimated 200,000 school-age children who have migrated to urban areas or across the border due to hunger, the gross primary school enrolment of 30% could plummet even further.  This is likely to be compounded by an acute shortage of teachers and an increase in demand for education services in areas where influxes of internally displaced people have been the greatest, such as in Mogadishu. 

"Education is a critical component of any emergency response," said Rozanne Chorlton, UNICEF Somalia Representative.  "Schools can provide a place for children to come to learn, as well as access health care and other vital services. Providing learning opportunities in safe environments is critical to a child’s survival and development and for the longer term stability and growth of the country."

Already, most of 10,000 teachers across the southern and central regions are dependent on incentives paid through the support of Education Cluster partners. Results indicate that in Lower and Middle Juba as well as Bay regions, up to 50 percent of teachers may not return to the classroom when schools reopen. 

In her job as a teacher-training co-ordinator in Huíla province, 43-year-old nun, Sister Cecília Kuyela witnesses school overcrowding every day. Primary School 200, which serves the poor area of João de Almeida, has 7,348 pupils for 138 teachers and eight permanent classrooms. At peak periods, classes are held in the street. But that is the least of Sister Cecília's worries.

During the war, people with only a grade 3 or 4 education became teachers. Since 2002, the pressure to meet MDG2 and to reduce Angola's 27% teenage illiteracy rate has seen the country recruit thousands of untrained school-leavers into teaching.

According to Unicef, less than 10% of five-year-olds have access to preschool. Only 76% of children between six and 11 are in primary school. Overall, more than 1 million six- to 17-year-olds are out of school.

What is lacking, however, is specialised training of teachers, which limit the implementation of inclusive training, he said.

Few teachers have specialised training, and none have formal training for multigrade teaching. This means that there is a lack of skills to pitch lessons at different grades, while many teachers generally struggle with classroom management.

A shortage of teachers in the fields of accounting, mathematics, languages, computer studies and geography has been identified.

KINSHASA, 14 November 2011 (IRIN) - Access to basic education in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains poor, with up to seven million children across the vast country out of school - despite a 2010 government decision to make primary education free.

It said 25 percent of the primary school-aged children and 60 percent of adolescents were not enrolled in classes.

"Even with the announcement of free primary education, parents, many of whom are unemployed and have little means of sustaining themselves, are bearing most of the costs involved in educating their children because of delays in releasing the funds for free education," Ornelie Lelo, communications officer for an education NGO in the capital, SOS Kinshasa, told IRIN.

NIAMEY, Niger, 6 February 2012 – The effect of food insecurity on children’s health is obvious; children, particularly those under age 5, are vulnerable to life-threatening malnutrition. Less obvious is the devastating impact of the crisis on children’s education. When there is not enough to eat, school can quickly become an afterthought. This is the scenario now facing countless families in the Sahel region of Africa, where a food crisis is looming. Particularly at risk are children in Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad and localized areas of Senegal.

“We have never had so little food,” said Oumou. “Of course, I want to continue going to school, but sometimes I am so hungry and low on energy that I cannot even see the blackboard.”

“Last year was okay, but not this year,” Souleye said. “I eat at school during the day, but it is not enough. Sometimes, I cannot sleep at night because of stomach cramps.”

Siphiso Nyoni, 15, races home when the final bell rings at Luveve High School in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city because she shares an accounts textbook with five other classmates and needs to get her homework done as soon as possible. "You are sometimes forced to rush through the assignment and in the process make silly mistakes because someone is waiting to take her turn using the same textbook," she told IRIN.

In January 2010 the Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture put the ratio of text books to pupils at about one to 10, but teachers in the capital, Harare, have reported instances of 40 pupils sharing one text book at some schools. "It is difficult to teach and motivate pupils when a whole class has to share five textbooks," said Aquillina Dhliwayo, the accounts teacher at Luveve High. The school devised a scheme in which pupils living in the same neighbourhood were put into clusters so they could share textbooks more easily.

Enrolment at primary schools nationwide has leapt from 59% in 2000 to 95.4% today, putting the impoverished country well on course to achieve the second millennium development goal (MDG) of primary school education for all by 2015.

half of pupils will fail to qualify for secondary school, with 3,000 girls a year dropping out due to pregnancy.

The progress has come with a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Enrolment has grown so fast in Tanzania that the school system is creaking with overcrowded classrooms, shortages of books, teachers and toilets, and reports of corporal punishment being used to keep order. In short, it seems that quality has been sacrificed for quantity.

Decades of political violence in northern Central African Republic have caused widespread destruction and displacement. The educational sector has been badly affected by a dire shortage of teachers and adequate physical infrastructure. For thousands of children, classes take place not in solid buildings of brick, but in rudimentary “bush schools”.

“Needs are huge and funds insufficient. More appropriate infrastructure as well as qualified teachers are needed. Because of difficulties in the conflict-affected areas of the North, disparities in terms of access and quality are deepening,” Farid Boubekeur, chief education officer with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in CAR, told IRIN.

For about 200 pupils of the primary school Ecole Ouande, in the Linguiri Village of the M'Brès Sub-Prefecture in the northeast of the country, lessons are conducted under a big tree with five pupils sharing each wooden desk.

CAPE TOWN, 11 May 2011 (IRIN) - Instead of providing much needed opportunities, South Africa’s ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation.

The study, "Low Quality Education as Poverty Trap", found that the schooling available to children in poor communities is reinforcing rather than challenging the racial and economic inequities created by South Africa’s apartheid-era policies.

The government allocated R190 billion (US$28 billion) or 21 percent of its 2011/12 budget to education, but 80 percent is spent on personnel and the remainder is not enough to supply thousands of schools in mainly poor areas with basic requirements like electricity and textbooks.

KABUL, Afghanistan, 5 July 2011 – New classrooms, chairs and desks mean better education at Shirino High School, one of the schools renovated and refurbished with funds from the Government of Japan as part of its ‘1,000 Classrooms’ initiative.

There were lots of problems last year, our students were sitting outside in the sun and they didn’t have a classroom,” recalls Shirino High School Headmistress Qamar Hadi. “There were no chairs or tables for the students.”

With new classrooms, the number of children enrolled in school has increased and retention rates have improved

Speaking at the graduation ceremony today, the Vice President of the Eritrean Institute of Technology, Dr. Gebreberhan Ogbazgi, noted the significance of distance learning program in tackling shortage of teachers, and such a program should be enhanced.

Likewise, the Minister of Education, Mr. Semere Russom, stressed the paramount importance of upgrading the competence of teachers