Education For All: Nigeria Needs 200,000 Teachers

The Civil Society Action Coalition on Education For All, says Nigeria needs to recruit at least 200,000 teachers by 2015 to achieve the Education For All (EFA) target.

Mrs. Chioma Osuji, the Acting Policy Adviser of the organisation, an NGO, made this known in Abuja on Wednesday at an event to mark the Global Action Week with the theme: “Every Child Needs a Teacher.”

Osuji stressed the need for Nigeria to increase its teachers’ workforce due to increase in enrolment of pupils.

She said that developing countries were facing challenges in meeting the demand for primary teachers as teachers’ shortages, especially in rural areas remained a major obstacle toward the achievement of the EFA goal.

“According to the latest projection by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), at least 1.7 million new teaching positions must be created to accommodate the growing demand for primary education.

“Countries will have to recruit another 5.1 million teachers to make up for attrition as teachers currently in the workforce retire or leave the profession.

“So, 6.8 million teachers should be recruited by 2015 in order to provide the right to education to all primary school-age children.”

According to her, the report shows that there is severe shortage of teachers across the sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria inclusive.

She also stressed the need to increase the size of the teaching workforce in primary education between 2010 and 2015 by creating almost one million new primary teaching positions in the next few years.

The NGO boss said that for Nigeria to bridge the teachers gap, 39,239 qualified teachers should be engaged annually for Universal Basic Education (UBE) up to year 2020 and 80,364 for Adult and non-Formal Education.

“With the increase in the rate of out of school children in Nigeria and the shortage of teachers at all levels of education, the pressure to hire many teachers to meet set goals become imperative toward meeting the EFA and MDGs goal,” she said.

Mr. Okafor Toochukwu, the Acting National Moderator of the NGO, said that the lack of qualified teachers in Nigerian schools was a major challenge toward the promotion of quality education.

According to Toochukwu, there is need to increase the quantity and quality of teachers in Nigeria to meet internationally agreed standard of teacher-pupil ratio.

“The right teacher-pupil ratio is 1:40, while Nigeria has about 1:134 or 1:78 across the states of the federation.”

He said that Nigeria still had a high number of untrained teachers in schools, especially due to paucity of funds for capacity building.

“Also, our national budget still fails to reflect the UNESCO standard of 26 percent allocation to education.

“This is limiting the initiatives for the promotion of children’s access to quality education such as teacher training, recruitment and decent teacher remuneration.”

Toochukwu urged the Federal Government to mobilse internal and external resources to increase funding for the education sector to address programmes related to teacher development.