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The interest being shown by several African countries to recruit teachers from Zimbabwe is a positive development that Government should urgently pursue to ensure that thousands of unemployed graduate teachers are formally employed.
Government recently revealed that it was engaging Botswana, Namibia and Rwanda — for the exportation of nearly 20 000 unemployed graduate teachers who cannot be absorbed in the local education sector following a job freeze of nearly 13 000 vacancies.
We are confident the latest overtures will bring the issue to finality, after an earlier attempt to export our teachers to South Sudan hit a snag amid security concerns for local teaching personnel in the northern African country.
Although the Public Service Commission (PSC) is negotiating with Treasury for the employment of 5 000 teachers to reduce the deficit of educators in schools which have almost 13 000 vacancies, the figures will not be enough to absorb all the graduates.
Faced with such a scenario, it becomes prudent for Government to vigorously pursue the possibility of bilateral engagements with interested countries so that the majority of these teachers can then be employed outside the country.
We believe the scope of collaboration between the interested countries premised on government-to-government bilateral relations would greatly benefit both the teachers and Zimbabwe financially in the long-term.
Remittances from the multitudes of our workers will result in a constant source of income — unlike aid, foreign direct investment (FDI) and other private flows — remittances are affected less by international financial and market crises, a situation that works in our favour as a nation, as we strive to harness all sources of income to rejuvenate our economy.
At household level, remittances will go a long way in easing the financial and social burden of families back home.
Remittances can also improve living conditions for their families, enabling them to embark on several projects at household level.
Studies carried out elsewhere show that remittances lead to substantial improvement in education for the benefiting families because the average educational expenditure of households that receive remittances is almost three times higher than those that receive income only from domestic sources.
By and large, the right implementation of the bilateral agreements for the exportation of our teaching force should create a right template which the Government can use for future arrangements across trained personnel in various sectors such as the nursing field.
Already the country is battling with a huge turnover of trained nurses, who cannot be absorbed in our health institutions following a freeze of nursing posts. It is against this background that we would want our teachers to be utilised elsewhere.
In exporting our teachers, we are not reinventing the wheel, but we are merely implementing global labour trends. Countries like Cuba and Philippines remain the beacons of exported labour across the globe and they have benefited immensely from the initiative.
In the 1970s, the Philippine government adopted a comprehensive range of policies that, among other things, systematically encouraged the export of contract labour to address escalating unemployment rate and balance of payments crisis. The programme which was developed during the leadership of Ferdinand Marcos, was rationalised as a temporary measure to address the country’s immediate problems.
However, four decades later, after a series of governments, the labour export programmes is still much alive. For instance in 2013, Philippines exported about 1,3 million migrant workers to 190 countries, each one bearing an employment contract issued and certified by the Filipino government.
Cuba is also one country well known for exporting labour in form of doctors and other medical personnel to several countries with Zimbabwe having benefited since independence.
Such success stories should motivate us to write our positive narrative, a possible feat considering our unparalleled record of hard work and honesty.
We therefore urge the parties involved in the anticipated bilateral agreements to ensure that the contracts are thorough and precise to guard against maltreatment, illegal recruitment sub-contracting and other heinous activities that continue to put a dent on labour exports in many countries.
Due diligence would need to be done to ensure standardised employment contracts, issuing deployment bans to countries with poor migrant worker protection records and regularly review existing contracts in line with emerging international labour requirements and trends.
Online Reporter