Ghana has been selected among 17 other African countries to participate in a-four-year pilot UNESCO sponsored programme to restructure national teacher policies and teacher education.

The Teacher Training Initaitive for Sub-Sahara Africa (TTISSA) which aims to increase the number of teachers and improve the quality of teaching, was initiated at the UNESCO general assembly in Paris last year, where 46 African countries were selected to progressively participate.

The project, launched in Accra on Wednesday will, among other things, focus on school level curricula to meet new needs of learners through appropriate technologies and distance education, develop networks for teacher training institutions for joint activities and sharing of resources and good practices among member countries.

It will also address the status, working conditions and performance of teachers so as to give a new image to the teaching profession to be more attractive and thereby inspire confidence and efficiency.

Speaking at the launch, Ms. Elizabeth Moundo, Director of the UNESCO Cluster Office in Accra, said the initiative is designed to assist countries in synchronizing their teacher education and labour policies with national development priorities for Education-For-All and the Millennium Development Goals.

She said that the right to education is for all and it is therefore important to focus on teachers as the most significant component of the education system.

The project will be implemented in close collaboration with governments, especially ministries of education, teacher education institutions and educators.

The Chairman of the TTISSA advisory committee, Professor Jophus Anamuah-Mensah, said the initiative has come at the right time given the acute teacher student ratio in the country.

He hoped that it would address the shortage of teachers, especially in the rural areas to make the teaching profession more attractive, as Ghana cannot train enough teachers to fill the gap by using conventional means.

Prof. Anamuah-Mensah, who is also the Vice Chancellor of the University of Education, Winneba, suggested that with Ghana benefiting from the inititative, teachers would in due course be licensed and their promotion based on performance and not on the number of years they have served.

Deputy Minister of Education, Science and Sports, Angelina Baiden-Amissah, who launched the initiative assured UNESCO of government’s support in running the project to adequately address the needs of the teaching profession.

She urged teacher training institutions to ensure that their products acquire the requisite knowledge, competencies, skills and dispositions that would make them effective on the field.

"Teachers, too, should promote quality teaching through diaqnostic testing, guidance and counseling of students for better learning outcomes," she said.

Mrs.Baiden-Amissah said that curriculum reforms in all teacher training institutions would be pursued to include literacy, sustainable development, HIV/AIDS prevention and management, information and communications technology and appealed to the private sector to support the initiative to enable Ghana to adequately prepare its human resource to be globally competitive.

By Stephen Kwabena Effah
Friday, 18 August 2006 (Page 4)