We celebrate World Teachers’ Day on October 5, 2024, under the theme: "Valuing Teacher Voices: Towards a New Social Contract for Education." We value the role teachers play as they are the most important in-school factor for learning. Our teacher training program equips teachers with the ability to facilitate learning and help students develop a sense of belonging and responsibility for the development of their communities, on top of teaching the fundamental skills of languages, mathematics, and understanding of the wider world.
We have decided to support education as a public common good by investing in teacher training in the countries in the southern hemisphere. The bold decision, made possible by strong cooperation agreements we have with the national governments, has contributed to an increase in access to education for children from disadvantaged communities, mostly located in rural areas.
We are delighted to present one of our Humana People to People Teacher Training programs being implemented by our member, ADPP Mozambique. A newly produced film captures the journey of a teacher during and after her training and the teaching methods she uses to teach in a rural primary school. She is a professional and qualified teacher who is passionate about using innovation, creativity, and groundbreaking teaching pedagogies in teaching children in her class. See the film below.
Teachers must be valued, as they are key agents of transformation in education – and education systems need to transform to support them. Bringing qualified, supported, and motivated teachers into classrooms is the single most important thing to support the learning and well-being of communities. In many parts of the world, teachers are too few, classrooms are too crowded, and teachers are overworked, demotivated, and unsupported. This has negative results on the whole educational experience and its outcomes.
“44 million additional teachers are needed to achieve universal primary and secondary education by 2030,” says UNESCO 2023 report. Sadly, sub-Saharan Africa alone needs 15 million more teachers.
Our Humana People to People teacher training program trains primary school teachers who are determined to teach in rural areas, where teachers are most needed; teachers who know how to involve children to make them active in their education. We train qualified professional primary school teachers to assume an expanded role, not only as knowledge providers but also as knowledge producers, and sense-makers of complex realities.
Our Humana People to People teacher training pedagogy is applied together with national curriculums for the training of primary school teachers in 55 teacher training colleges located in Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea Bissau, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and India. Over 64,000 primary school teachers have been trained since 1993 and are mostly teaching in rural communities.
We are committed to training professional and qualified primary school teachers as transforming education begins with investing in teachers! We call for increased funding for teacher training to stop current trends in global teacher shortages.