Teacher crisis blamed for poor results

The Zambian government has failed to employ 9,000 teachers that were trained between 2002 and 2003, a situation, which has led to a disaster in the delivery of primary education in the country. Zambian Basic Schools now face a choice of either turning away pupils from class, or to function with as many as 100 pupils congested in one classroom.

The Basic Education Teachers Union of Zambia (BETUZ) has charged that the massive school dropouts and examination leakages in schools are as a result of government’s lack of capacity to employ more teachers. BETUZ General Secretary Justin Katongo said the process to quality Education for All (EFA) will be messed up if government did not quickly restore flexible allowances for the only few teachers working by January 2005.

Government owes primary school teachers huge amounts in allowances, leave and travel benefits. “This de-motivates teachers as these allowances keep on accumulating”, said Katongo. And UNICEF Country Representative Dr. Stella Goings has urged government to think of making education from Grade one to Grade 12 free, if Education-for-All is to be attained by 2015.
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In December 2004, Zambian Minister of Education Andrew Mulenga revealed that out of approximately 236,000 pupils who registered for grade seven examinations, nearly 236,000 sat for the exams, with only 111, 861 making it to grade eight, accounting for 52 per cent reduction in the overall progression rate.

This state of affairs has been blamed on government’s inertia and failure to improve the working conditions of teachers, especially those in rural areas, who require hardships allowances and other risk benefits. The Zambia National Union of Teachers (ZNUT) has attributed the declining education standards in the country to government’s poor investment in the teaching profession.

ZNUT Secretary Roy Mwaba said the Union regretted that only half of the pupils who sat for primary examinations made it into secondary school. “Even those who passed, the effects of the bad teaching will be seen later on when they start working”, Mwaba said.

Investigations reveal that due to shortage of teachers, some schools in the capital city, Lusaka are forced to teach subjects which they are not specialized in. “We as teachers are de-motivated, so how can we teach when we are so overloaded?”, asked Clement Mweene, a primary school teacher in Lusaka.

A local political Movement, Patriotic Front (PF) has bemoaned the teacher crisis in the country, calling for a sustained recruitment of trained teachers into schools. PF President Michael Sata accuses the current government of having achieved a poor record on education. “Without a teacher, there will be no lawyer, there will be no President and there will be no medical doctor. How can you have educated teachers to become loafers”, Sata posed, in reference to the 9,000 teachers on the ‘streets’, adding that government should pay attention to human resource development if EFA was to be attained.

Meanwhile, the country is alleged to be lacking an implementation strategy for achieving universal primary education. Former Education Minister Dr. Sichalwe Kasanda says the free education policy for primary education was well-intended, but would require careful implementation, as it was invaluable in achieving universal education.

Dr.Kasanda says the danger of offering free education was that it could create a syndrome of dependency of citizens on the government, as even those who could afford to pay for education would want to get it free. “You disempower people who are already empowered. This may promote the culture of dependence on the government”, said Dr. Kasanda.

This would also translate into increased costs for the government even when people in urban areas could help by paying for education. “It means our budget will never reduce. We need to know how much it costs to educate each child and focus on those rural areas with vulnerable children”.

Some analysts have called for the country to establish another University to help absorb the over 20,000 School Certificate holders who are produced every year. Rabecca Monde, Director of the Community for Human Development (CHD) in Zambia says the thousands of entrants, who qualify for University cannot all be absorbed by the two Universities. Zambia has only two Universities; the University of Zambia (UNZA) Main Campus in the capital-Lusaka, and
the Copper belt University (CBU) based on the Copper belt province.

The two Universities collectively enroll less than 3,000 students every year, out of the 20,000 who graduate from secondary schools.

In order to avert the teacher crisis in schools, government has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Zambia Open Community Schools (ZOCS). According to the agreement, Community Schools in
Zambia will strive to attain the same primary education in 4 years that children receive in 7 years in the formal education sector.

The teachers in Community Schools are not formally trained and come from the community where the school is based. They use whatever building or open space they find to teach in, and have limited resources such as books, desks and blackboards. ZOCS is currently working in conjunction with the Ministry of
Education to receive teacher certification, the same as in Government Schools.

A new “Global Campaign for Education” report explains just how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies squeeze Zambia’s education system. IMF’s sister organization, the World Bank, also acknowledges that Zambian teachers are not only inadequate, but also underpaid.

The teacher crisis, together with other issues related to lack of resources could derail Zambia’s EFA progress, according to the IMF Staff report. Zambia would fail to achieve universal completion of primary school by 2015 along with almost all the other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs