Category Archives: Education in Africa

Closing the Teacher Gap: Almost 69 Million Teachers Needed

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By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and Vikas Pota, Chief Executive of The Varkey Foundation

Many of us had one we will never forget – a teacher who inspired and encouraged us. We were fortunate. Millions of children today are not so lucky.

On World Teachers’ Day (5 October), the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) has released a paper setting out the first-ever estimates of how many more teachers are needed to ensure that every child is in school and learning what they need to know by 2030. In short, the world has just 14 years to recruit a total of 68.8 million teachers: 24.4 million primary teachers, and almost twice as many – 44.4 million – secondary school teachers. Continue reading →

Missing from School: The Education Challenge in sub-Saharan Africa

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By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and Aaron Benavot, Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report

With the Eurozone in turmoil and sluggish economic growth in the US and elsewhere, investors may well see sub-Saharan Africa – still one of the fastest growing regional economies on earth – as the new frontier. While the region’s economic growth has slowed, falling from 4.5% in 2014 to 3% in 2015, it continues to outpace growth in many of the world’s most advanced economies. However, as the World Bank has noted, the region faces major economic headwinds, from disparities and poverty to falling commodity prices. Continue reading →

The eAtlas for Education 2030 – Global and Thematic Indicators at Your Fingertips

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Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Our recent blogs have focused on the difficulties of trying to gather robust and internationally-comparable data on education, with policymakers, researchers and citizens struggling to make sense of conflicting numbers from multiple data sources, or trying to find any numbers at all. For non-statisticians, the data picture is blurry, at best. Various blogs have argued that the lack of data is a real stumbling block to the pursuit of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on education and the Education 2030 Framework for Action. The good news is that things are about to get a lot easier.   Continue reading →