Workshop on Capacity Building in Teacher Policy Development and Implementation ends
A workshop on Capacity Building in Teacher Policy Development and Implementation organised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) for educational heads in West Africa ended in Accra on Thursday.
The three-day workshop, in collaboration with Ministry of Education and International Institute of Capacity Building in Africa, was aimed at sharing experiences of countries in the sub-region to identify common elements to guide the process of teacher policy development and its implementation.
It brought together about 14 participants from the Economic Community of West African States.
Speaking at the closing ceremony, Miss Sylvia Lutterodt, Acting Secretary General of the National Commission for UNESCO Ghana, said Sub- Sahara Africa was currently confronted with many challenges as it strived to achieve quality, especially where it concerned the management of teachers.
Sub-Sahara Africa is currently facing major challenges of shortage of properly trained and experienced teachers to handle the important and socially significant job of teaching Africa’s children.
Miss Lutterodt said UNESCO had initiated some programmes such as Teacher Training Initiative for Sub-Sahara Africa and other related programmes to assist countries to manage the gap created due to lack of teachers to enhance education delivery.
“These have proved to be very useful supports that have provided ideas being considered to reduce the tension in the relationship between education management and teachers,” she said.
Miss Lutterodt expressed the hope that the workshop would provide the essential guidance to countries as they charted their respective courses in defining appropriate policies to enhance teaching as a profession and also ensure they delivered quality services on the job.
She pledged the National Commission’s support to ensure smooth facilitation of quality education delivery for development.
Miss Lutterodt encouraged African governments to motivate teachers to prevent them from leaving the profession.
Source: GNA
Workshops, seminars, conferences etc are in themselves not bad; many a time they result in many brilliant documents. It is what we do with the ideas generated at these programmes that is problematic.
It appears what attract many people to the programmes are fine speeches, socialization and item thirteen. The programme, more or less, becomes an end in itself. I think the gap in implementation is monitoring and evaluation.