Accra, Oct. 26, GNA - The Malian capital, Bamako, will from Tuesday host a three-day Second International Conference on Contractual Teachers. The conference is being referred to as Bamako + 5 because it is taking place five years after the first meeting on the issue ended in the capital with the adoption of the 2004 Bamako Consensus, and the recommendations on the professional development and management of the careers of contractual teachers.

A statement released in Accra on Monday by Mr Lawalley Cole, Co-ordinator, Working Group on Communication for Education and Development (WG COMED), said in 2004 the first conference discussed this new category of teachers and examined the challenges ahead in 11 francophone African countries.

The Bamako +5 conference is co-organised by the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, the World Bank, Education International and the Malian Ministry of Basic Education, Literacy and National Languages. Contractual teachers constitute a specific category of individuals who are teachers with basic secondary education but with no formal teacher training. In some cases, they are unemployed graduates, or graduates from teacher colleges, or secondary school graduates fresh from the classroom, who is hired to teach on contract basis at a lower salary than regular teachers receive.

The statement said concern had been raised in many quarters on the quality of teaching dispensed by these contractual teachers, due their low academic level and insufficient training. It noted that many African countries were faced with an acute shortage of teachers.

The statement said in 2000, African governments committed themselves during the Dakar Global Forum to ensure quality education for all. "It is a two-fold challenge to equitably enhance access to and improve the quality of education. This exercise requires, inter alia, an inventive spirit, a review of existing policies and practices and an exchange of good ones particularly in the area of teacher development and teacher training." According to the 2005 Global Monitoring Report on Education For All (EFA) published by UNESCO, if Africa intends to meet the EFA objectives by 2015 and fulfil its Dakar commitments, it would need to train about four million teachers and ensure that the majority of the teachers to be recruited are professionally qualified. "Teachers play a crucial role in fostering access to education and in improving its quality. Several studies and reports from international professional bodies such as specialised UN and other international development agencies have testified to the fact that with the right qualifications, adequate wages and other incentives, professional teachers will play a fundamental role in achieving the goal of Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals.

"Hence the qualification of teachers and their training in adequate numbers are among the indicators of quality education." The statement noted that the problems faced in most African countries were many and varied, and they included the absence of a training policy, the lack of a connection between initial training and in-service training, inadequate academic and pedagogic preparation, obsolete and ill-adapted training programmes, the lack of pedagogic material, inadequate incentives for teachers due to low wages and the absence of a career development plan. It said faced with these problems and the enormous requirements to get additional teachers to fulfil their EFA commitments, African governments resorted to hiring contractual teachers, adding that in some countries these teachers had now outnumbered regular trained teachers. The statement said at the secondary level, education decision-makers faced the problem of attracting able graduates to the teaching profession and retaining them there. "In Africa, in particular, shortages of teachers, especially in areas such as mathematics, science and technology, pose a major threat to the goals of expanding education and enhancing its quality. "The shortage of teachers will continue to be the main challenge for teacher policies in the near future. This is likely to be the case worldwide, although the reasons vary - demography, labour market trends, the impact of HIV/AIDS, and so on," it said.