Teacher motivation and incentives in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia

This paper focuses on teacher motivation and incentives in low-income developing countries (LICs) in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In particular, it assesses the extent to which the material and psychological needs of teachers are being met. This includes overall levels of occupational status, job satisfaction, pay and benefits, recruitment and deployment, attrition, and absenteeism. Some of the papers key lessons are:

• improving teacher status and motivation - the image and performance of the teaching profession needs to be improved in many LICs through higher standards of certification and recruitment. For example, certification for primary school teachers could be upgraded to diploma levels
• teacher deployment - the way teachers are assigned to schools needs to be addressed, especially where patronage and rent-seeking is common. Decentralising staffing within the education sector, coupled with more specific measures such as offering incentives to teachers in remote and hard to staff areas, are potential solutions
• absenteeism - understanding why teachers do not attend school requires more detailed, regular, high quality research and data in order to establish the best reforms and sanctions to apply to reduce such absenteeism
• teacher compensation - establishing pay structures should be a decentralised process, market-driven, and responsive to location and subjects taught. Although financial incentives tend to be more effective where directed at teams rather than individuals, the potential for free-riding presents a challenge
• community participation and decentralisation - decentralisation that is also linked to greater community mobilisation for the funding of basic education can lead to lower rather than higher community participation
• teachers and EFA - governments and donors tend to be primarily concerned with meeting MDG enrolment targets and increasing access to education, placing much less emphasis on the roles of teachers. As teachers' wages represent the largest proportion of public expenditures on education, and as this directly competes with funding for increasing access for all, this tension will need to be addressed by education reforms for EFA and for improving the quality of education

A future research agenda must continue to focus on teacher motivations and incentives as teacher performance is of critical importance in attaining EFA with reasonable learning outcomes. There also needs to be a shift in research focus away from large-scale econometrics-driven surveys to more detailed sociological and ethnographic qualitative research. [adapted from author]