South Africa loses increasing numbers of teachers via emigration

In a recent presentation titled “South African teacher migration: an issue of political debate“, Rian de Villiers from the Faculty of Education at the University of Pretoria indicated that South Africa loses approximately 4000 teachers each year to emigration. This means that new teachers will have to be aggresively recruited and produced to curb the decline in numbers of teachers.

De Villiers showed that teachers loss in South Africa was due to attrition, career change and massive recruitment by foreign countries.

Factors which seem to be pushing teachers out of SA were:

• Career dissatisfaction
• Low salaries
• Unemployment

Factors attracting teachers to other countries include:

• Higher salaries
• Professional development
• Travel opportunities
• Friends and family overseas
• Recruitment agency persuasion.

Possible solutions given by De Villiers include:

• Recruiting retired and unemployed subject experts
• Having a compulsory one-year internship after graduation
• Making more bursary schemes available for prospective student teachers
• Monitoring teacher recruitment agencies closely
• Introducing international relocation grants
• Eliminating negative perceptions about the teaching profession
• Improving teachers’ work conditions

To read more:

Go to Michelle Jones’ article in the Star Newspaper by Clicking Here!   

Go to Michelle Jones and Leanne Jansen’s article in The Mercury by Clicking Here! 

To access Rian De Villiers’ presentation Click Here!

Research in Africa on downward spiral

Wachira Kigotho recently wrote an article in The Standard Online Edition on the “Death of Research in Africa”. In this article he indicates that the scientific gap between Sub-Saharan African countries and the rest of the world is widening to unacceptable levels as a result of weak or total absence of research policies. He reiterrates that when these countries are measured in terms of published scientific papers and patent applications, most countries are experiencing a staggering collapse of scientific output and innovation. National scientific communities that flourished between 1970s and 1980s in Sub-Saharan Africa have floundered or become too small to function effectively. He lists the following possible reasons for the decline:

• erosion of academic oversight and direction
• paralysis because of budgetary shortfalls
• absence of career prospects
• high staff turnover
• large number of researchers emigrated or changed professions
• virtually no recruitment of scientists in the region throughout the 1990s
• wages paid to scientists in most African countries are no longer adequate to live on
• funding for science and research partnerships with universities and research institutes in other countries have declined
• vibrant scientific journals, many of them supported by university departments have disappeared and those that appear are so poorly edited that they have lost their reputed contributors or have been discarded by scientific databases, thus marginalising the scientific output of these countries

Exceptions are countries in Sub-Saharan Africa whose scientists are relatively active in agriculture and medicine.

To read the whole article Click Here!