That is the figure that the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), an international coalition of charities and teacher unions, believes is the very minimum necessary to achieve the target — agreed by the United Nations in 2000 as a Millennium Development Goal and reaffirmed at the G8 summit at Gleneagles a year ago — of providing universal free access to primary education by 2015. Strides towards this goal have been taken in several countries, thanks to the combined effects of debt relief and increased aid: Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania have scrapped school fees for primary education, luring an extra seven-million children into the classroom. But where are the new teachers needed to teach them?
It is these missing millions who are the focus of the current campaign by the GCE, My Friend Needs a Teacher, which aims to ensure every child has a trained and properly paid teacher and can be taught in a class of no more than 40 pupils.
Teaching is not, in many developing countries, a particularly attractive career. Training can be scarce or non-existent (in Uganda, for example, half have no training at all). Pay is often poor; in some countries, teachers can go for months without receiving their salaries. Class sizes are huge — 60 to 100 pupils for each teacher — and classrooms overcrowded or improvised. HIV/Aids has cut a dreadful path through the profession and threatens its replenishment.
The cost of meeting the goal of free, universal primary education by 2015 is estimated at $100-billion. The GCE says there is currently a shortfall in funding of $10-billion a year. —