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Maina Waruru
Correspondent
Investing in teachers and school leaders in Africa is the most important factor in promoting educational opportunities for girls, keeping them in school and ending child marriage, ultimately reducing gender inequality through education.
Having more female teachers in schools and having more of them lead the institutions is even more important for keeping the girls in school beyond the primary level and providing them with role models to motivate them to continue learning.
While low educational attainment for girls and child marriage are profoundly detrimental for the girls, their families, communities, and societies, investments in teachers and school leaders are also key in ending lack of learning, identified as the single biggest cause of school dropout for girls, besides traditional factors, including social and cultural ones.
Despite data showing that less than a fifth of teachers at the secondary level for example, are women in many African countries, and the proportion of female school leaders is even lower, the teachers have been proven to improve student learning and girls’ retention beyond primary and lower secondary school.
As a result, better opportunities must be given to women teachers and school leaders in order to bring additional benefits to girls’ education, as women often remain in teaching for a longer time, a report by the United Nations and the African Union says.
The absence of the above has led to high drop-outs, resulting in low educational attainment, a higher prevalence of child marriage, and higher risks of early childbearing for girls across Africa, according to the report, Educating Girls and Ending Child Marriage in Africa: Investment Case and the Role of Teachers and School Leaders.
“Increasing investments in girls’ education yields large economic benefits, apart from being the right thing to do. This requires interventions for adolescent girls, but it should also start with enhancing foundational learning through better teaching and school leadership,” the document tabled at the 1st Pan-African Conference on Girls and Women’s Education taking place July 2-5 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The lack of foundational learning is a key cause leading to drop-out in primary and lower-secondary schools, it finds, further noting that while teachers and school leaders are key to it, new approaches are also needed for pedagogy and for training teachers and school heads.
“Targeted interventions for adolescent girls are needed, but they often reach only a small share of girls still in school at that age; by contrast, improving foundational learning would benefit a larger share of girls (and boys) and could also make sense from a cost-benefit point of view,” it adds.
Parents in 10 francophone countries who responded to household surveys cited the lack of learning in school — the absence of teaching despite children attending classes — for their children dropping out, accounting for over 40 percent of both girls and boys dropping out of primary school, it further reveals.
The lack of learning, blamed on teacher absence, accounts for more than a third of students dropping out at the lower secondary level, meaning that improving learning could automatically lead to significantly increased educational attainment for girls and boys alike.
“To improve learning, reviews from impact evaluations and analysis of student assessment data suggest that teachers and school leaders are key. Yet new approaches are needed for professional development, including through structured pedagogy and training emphasizing practice. Teachers must also be better educated.” — IPS
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