The new phase of the successful Quality Educators for All Project - “Every child needs a good teacher” - has been launched in Mali, aiming to improve teacher quality, teaching, and learning in the country.
Education International (EI) Senior Coordinator Dennis Sinyolo acknowledged the work of EI’s partner, Oxfam Novib, and the Quality Educators project partners in Mali – the Syndicat National de l'Education et de la Culture, the Association des Jeunes pour le Développement Endogène au Sahel and the Ministry of Education. At the launch in Bamako, Mali, from 2-4 March, under the patronage of the Education Minister Barthélémy Togo, Sinyolo praised these organisations for their commitment to improving the quality of education in Mali through this project.
Praise for Minister
Sinyolo also commended Togo “for fully embracing the project and providing the necessary policy direction, technical support, training and monitoring since the project’s inception”. He noted the Government’s considerable efforts to integrate more than 800 community teachers into the public service.
Togo underlined the Malian government’s continued commitment to support this project, which falls within the framework of the objectives of the government’s 10-year programme of development of education. He also said that the government is committed increasing teachers’ salaries by FCFA25,000 (equivalent to €38) per month and to accelerate the process of turning community schools into public schools, “to give children the same opportunities in the competition for life, enabling them to play a role in the development of their country”.
Education International: Collaboration towards quality education
Education International urges Mali’s Government to accept all the community teachers who have been trained into the public service, Sinyolo said.
“The success of this project proves that governments, teacher unions, and civil society can work together to improve the quality of teaching and learning,” he highlighted. “Let’s make the next three years better than the last five years! We can do it, and we must do it, for the sake of all Malian children and youth!”
Drawing on experiences and lessons learnt from this project, Sinyolo said that EI is developing global guidelines on minimum professional teaching standards, which will help to raise teaching standards across the globe.
Award-winning initiative
The Quality Educators for All Project has gained recognition internationally. In 2014, it won the UNESCO-Hamdan Prize for Outstanding Practice and Performance in Enhancing the Effectiveness of Teachers in 2014. Sinyolo added that this project was recognised by UNESCO, the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the International Task Force on Teachers and other partners as a good model for improving teacher quality, teaching and learning.
He also underlined that the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, jointly headed by GPE Chair Julia Gillard (former Australian Prime Minister) and UN Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown (former British Prime Minister), is currently documenting examples of best practices in improving quality education, and Quality Educators is one of them.
Background
Through the Quality Educators for All project, EI joined forces with Oxfam Novib, a worldwide development organisation working to find practical, innovative ways for people to lift themselves out of poverty and thrive, to engage teacher unions, governments and civil society in jointly developing consensus-based competence profiles for teachers, and improve the quality of the education system.
Initiated in 2010 in Mali, the first phase was launched in the Segou region, and saw 5,500 teachers trained, 800 of whom were included in the public service. That first phase also focused on professional competence and acceptance in the public system of teacher community primary schools.
Drawing on lessons learned from that phase, the second phase, supported by Comic Relief like the previous one, will focus on the training of teachers of community schools, as well as secondary schools, on improving student learning in lower secondary education, and will include an ICT component in education.