Empowering Teachers for All Learners to Thrive: Launch of the IICBA Blog
October 5, 2023
Today is World Teachers’ Day, an auspicious day to launch the IICBA blog. The blog will feature essays by IICBA staff as well as guest essays from policy makers, researchers, teachers, and other education stakeholders. In a few months, IICBA will celebrate its 25th anniversary, during the African Union Year of Education (2024). Much needs to be done to improve teaching and learning in Africa. IICBA has a new strategic plan for 2023-25 to contribute to improving educational outcomes in Africa, as well as a new moto: “Empowering teachers for all learners to thrive.” A brief presentation of some of the activities of the Institute is available here.
To celebrate World Teachers’ Day, we are organizing several events today. The first event is a session on teachers at the KIX symposium, a three-day gathering of more than 250 researchers, policy makers, and education stakeholders held in Abidjan. KIX stands for Knowledge and Innovation Exchange. This is a great program for which IICBA manages the Hub for anglophone countries plus Mozambique. The funding for KIX for the next three years has been approved by the Global Partnership for Education and Canada’s International Development Research Center. Several innovations in how we support country learning and policies are in the work, and we will probably talk quite a bit about KIX activities in this blog.
The second event is a webinar with the African Union for the Continental Best Teacher Award. Eight individuals won the Award this year. You will find their interviews on the IICBA webpage for interviews. The Award winners are all extraordinary individuals, including for their dedication to their students. They hail from Ghana, Kenya, Mauritania, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa. They tell us in their interviews why they are passionate about teaching, and their advice for fellow teachers.. They also talk about the challenges teachers face, and they opportunities they may seize.
As argued in one of the IICBA Studies we are releasing today, teacher awards are important to celebrate the unique contribution that teachers make to their students, their communities, and societies. Today we are releasing three studies: one for West Africa, one for Sierra Leone, and one for The Gambia. All three studies are part of a project for the professionalization of teaching funded by the Shanghai municipality (Shanghai-FIT Project). They focus on three areas: (1) national frameworks of professional standards and competencies; (2) teacher education; and (3) the working conditions of teachers. The analysis relies on a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach including nationally representative surveys, two online surveys, key informant interviews, focus groups and brainstorming sessions. Lessons from these studies are likely to be relevant for other countries as well, and we will come back to these findings in subsequent blogposts.
We are also releasing today a Regional Training Guide to strengthen mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) for pre- and in-service teachers in Africa. Since 2020, IICBA has been partnering with the Regional Office for Southern Africa to build resilience and strengthen psychosocial support for Teachers and Teacher Educators in selected Sub-Saharan Africa countries. The project is anchored within the framing of UNESCO’s Africa program which focuses on “Our Rights, Our Lives, Our Future” (O3). It has supported among others (i) an assessment of the psychosocial impacts on teachers of the COVID-19 pandemic; (ii) the development of a contextualized sub-regional strategy on strengthening mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) for teachers in Africa; and (iii) the development of an evidence-based psychosocial support manual, school-based training manual, and tools for teachers and Teacher educators; and (iv) pilot training for teachers, educators and education experts in four countries. This training guide relates to activity (iii) and provides guidance for teachers on MHPSS.
IICBA Studies and Training guides are part of a new series of publications launched by IICBA this year. Beyond IICBA studies and training guides, you will find on our website a wide range of other publications, including discussion papers, short (4-page) knowledge briefs, interviews, event summaries, and reports. All these publications are in open access on our research page, and we welcome your contributions as well. If you send us a paper you would like us to publish, we will get it peer reviewed, and if the review is positive we will be happy to publish it. Similarly, do not hesitate to send us contributions for this blog.
There is one more exciting development at IICBA I would like to mention. We launched in May 2023 the IICBA Executive Education and Policy Academy which provides short courses and organized events, typically in collaboration with Ministries of Education. You can find examples of a dozen recent courses and events on our Academy webpage. If you have an idea for a training and would like our support, please let us know. We also launched a new webinar series. Again, if you have an idea for a webinar, please let us know as well.
We hope that with our new emphasis on research, policy dialogue, and capacity enhancement – the three main lines of actions in our new strategy, we can support your own work towards “empowering teachers for all learners to thrive.”