What makes teachers tick? Improving staff motivation in Africa

After years of top-down reform, under-funding and late payment of salaries, teachers' motivation is at rock bottom. Will it be possible to recruit, train and retain the estimated five million teachers needed in Africa to meet Education for All (EFA) objectives? What changes are required in national and international policy in order to enhance teacher motivation?

A report from Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) using data gathered from Malawi, Papua New Guinea and Zambia, explores teachers’ attitudes towards their profession. It outlines the disastrous consequences when policy-makers ignore teachers and treat them as people who passively put decisions into practice. It calls for a new approach that puts teachers’ needs and perspectives at the centre of decision-making.

VSO warns that low teacher morale threatens the achievement of the EFA goal. Teachers, especially in rural areas, are poorly paid and are increasingly being shown less and less respect. Their educational and training needs are neglected and they are stuck in bureaucracies that offer little in the way of support or career advancement. Teacher motivation is a critically ignored factor in education management and policy formulation at all levels: school, regional, national and international.

Teachers – themselves products of poor education systems – are blamed for their pupils’ shortcomings and are often seen as obstacles to educational change rather than key human resources. In many ways, the problems that teachers– the biggest body of public servants in almost all countries – face, exemplify the impact of externally driven economic trends on the developing world.

The report also highlights:

• the tendency to see teachers’ remuneration as an opportunity for cost reduction - the World Bank recommends pegging salaries as a percentage of per capita GDP
• the uncertain capacity of most education systems to absorb and make best use of additional aid without radical improvement in teachers’ agency and engagement in all aspects of the education system
• that civil-society/teacher consultation, so powerfully endorsed by all players at the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000, does not seem to be feeding into the creation of national education plans.

The report – part of VSO’s Valuing Teachers Advocacy Initiative – stresses the need for a more complete understanding of the interplay between teachers' remuneration requirements, professional support needs and their relationship to wider society. As a set of principles, ensuring that teachers’ needs are put back on the agenda and their voices are put at the heart  of  education requires:

• donors and lenders to stop influencing teachers’ pay levels: these must be a matter for collective negotiation and bargaining at country level
• teachers to be put in the center of decision-making for education policy and practice
• donors to talk with teachers’ representatives and include the extent to which teachers have participated in the formulation of national education plans as a key criterion in judging their viability
• education ministries to establish professional representative bodies for teachers to enable debate and discussion of teachers' needs and contributions: these should be outside the domain of industrial relations and terms and conditions
• decentralisation plans to include setting up communications systems between schools and educational authorities overseen by an ombudsman
• all education stakeholders to demonstrate the value of teachers and encourage the general public to take a more positive and supportive attitude towards them
• teachers’ unions to develop well-informed positions on debates around quality and relevance of education.

Source(s):
‘What makes teachers tick? A policy research report on teachers’ motivation in developing countries’, Voluntary Service Overseas, by L. Fry, 2002 Full document.

Funded by: VSO

id21 Research Highlight: 7 April, 2003

Further Information:
Lucia Fry (Senior Policy Advisor) or Lucy Tweedie (Senior Advocacy Officer)
VSO
317 Putney Bridge Road
London SW15 2PN
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8780 7200
Contact the contributor: lucia.fry@vso.org.uk

Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), UK

Contact the contributor: Lucy.Tweedie@vso.org.uk

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