Next Gen News

The UN estimates that 8 million teachers are needed worldwide by 2015. But how to compare countries? Get all the details here

The world urgently needs to hire more than 8 million additional teachers, according to UN estimates, warning that the impending shortage of primary school teachers threaten to undermine global efforts to ensuring access to universal primary education by 2015.

At least 2 million new teaching positions will be created in 2015, the UN said in a report released this week. Approximately 6.2 million additional teachers will be hired to maintain the current workforce and its replacement is expected to retire or leave the classroom because of career changes, illness or death.

Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Central African Republic (CAR) at the top of the list of countries that needed to mount aggressive recruitment campaigns in the next four years. Burkina Faso is needed to reinforce its strength in the teaching of almost 14% each year until 2015 to link the shortage of teachers in the country, while the labor force in Eritrea and RCA will grow by 18% and 21% respectively.

"An acute shortage of primary teachers is one of the biggest obstacles to achieving the goal of universal primary education," says the report, said: "The policies that respond effectively to the training and retention of teachers should be at the heart of national education policies. "

estimates prepared by the Montreal-based Institute for Statistics, to help countries identify the challenges of recruitment and to adjust their budgets.

Projections

Unesco are based on estimates of the number of teachers needed to maintain current student-teacher and try to take account of "attrition" to estimate that 5% of teachers leave each year.

projections according to Unesco, the greatest challenges lie in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 1 m of teaching positions will be created in 2015 to meet the needs of a growing number of elementary school students. Population growth and pressure to bring the children to school in 2015 led the school fees to rise in many countries, but the quality of education remains a major concern for countries unable to obtain sufficient teachers in the classroom. A total of 350,000 teachers must be recruited in sub-Saharan Africa each year until 2015 to fill new teaching positions and offset expected to leave the workforce, the report said.

A major challenge for many countries is the shortage of high school graduates. In Mozambique, the need for recruitment of teachers should significantly exceed the number of graduates who, in 2009 only 9.5% of school-age children were enrolled in the class. Similar situations are threatening efforts to recruit teachers in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Uganda and Tanzania.

Unesco convened to focus on women and gender balance among staff of the unit to hire more teachers.

"In many areas a small proportion of female teachers means fewer girls in school, let alone of women teachers in the future," said the Director General of UNESCO, Ms Bokova, in a statement released Wednesday, co-signed by the heads of three UN agencies and the Director of International Education, the International Federation of Education. "Appropriate measures for the protection of maternity and paternity, as well as effective protection from violence and abuse are essential. If qualified teachers to avoid places in rural and disadvantaged areas, how do we convince parents reluctant to send their children to school ? "

Between 1990 and 2009, the overall proportion of female teachers in primary education increased from 56% to 62%. But most of this growth occurred in Asia, where the proportion of female teachers increased from 32% to 45% in the South and West Asia and 48% to 61% in East Asia and Pacific. Sub-Saharan Africa, which had the lowest proportion of female teachers, growth was minimal -. 40% to 42%

we took data from the UNESCO report focuses on the numbers of teacher shortages in the world. You can also download all the information, including regional estimates of staffing needs. We also added the figures on the proportion of women in faculty positions 2007-09.

What can you do with the data
summary data

. DATA: Download the entire worksheet

data