Teacher Shortages, Teacher Contracts and Their Effect on Education in Africa

Abstract

To enhance primary enrolment rates, many African countries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years. Given tight budgetary constraints, teachers are no longer employed in civil service positions, but on the basis of (fixed term) contracts typically implying considerably lower salaries and a sharply reduced amount of professional training. We analyse the effect of this change on educational quality in Niger, Togo and Mali, on the basis of very informative data, which are comparable across these countries. We use a variety of estimation techniques, including a non-parametric estimation of quantile treatment effects. Our results demonstrate that contract teachers tend to reduce inequalities in student outcomes. Overall, the effects are positive in Mali, somewhat mixed in Togo and negative in Niger. This ordering is consistent with theoretical expectations related to the manner in which contract teacher programmes were implemented differently in each of the three countries under study. Copyright (c) 2009 Royal Statistical Society.

School Management in Developing Countries

“…(2005) suggest that students of regular teachers clearly outperform those of contract teachers, and Bourdon et al (2006) argue that contract teachers may deteriorate education quality. On the other hand, Bourdon et al (2007) suggest that contract teachers may have a positive impact, although they do find negative impacts when it is implemented in a more centralized manner. In addition to these studies, Goyal and Pandey (2009) report that contract teachers consistently demonstrated higher effort than regular teachers.…”

Preferences and skills of Indian public sector teachers

“…In particular, these studies have focused on the effects of the recruitment of local contract teachers (see e.g. Atherton and Kingdon, 2010;Bourdon et al 2010;de Laat and Vegas, 2005;Duflo et al 2012 andSundararaman, 2010).…”

“…Studies on contract teachers in other developing countries produce somewhat more mixed results (see e.g. Bourdon et al 2010, de Laat and Vegas, 2005). 14 The Uttarakhand BTC application data is publicly available, and entrance test marks of applicants are somewhat lower for women than for men.…”

Is teacher certification an effective tool for developing countries?

“…Another study that relied on matched comparisons between contract teachers with observationally similar civil servants in Mali, Togo, and Niger, found mixed results, with positive, null, and negative effects on student test scores in those countries, respectively [6].…”

“…Salaries for certified teachers represent approximately two-thirds of this amount [6]. Civil service teachers, who are usually certified, earn between 1.2 and five times the salaries of contract teachers, who are often uncertified, across several countries for which there is data ( Figure 2).…”