October 5th has been declared to be World Teachers’ Day, a day celebrating teachers and to commemorate teacher organizations around the world. Teaching is a central and important profession to society, yet one the most undermined and less respected professions in the world. World Teacher’s Day aims at creating support for teachers and to ensure that their needs and those needs of future generations will continue to be met.
While government emphasises the importance of highly trained and qualified teachers, the current demand for teachers is unmet with between 20 000 and 30 000 new teachers needed per year. While teachers are in oversupply in some areas, there are acute shortages in Maths, Science, IT, Commerce and indigenous African languages and intensified in some geographical regions.
To play our part in addressing the teacher shortage, GTI is launching the Fund the Future campaign on the GivenGain platform. Fund the Future is an online crowd-sourcing campaign where individuals can donate or fundraise to support teacher development though GTI’s Future Leader programme. The FLP develops new teachers through an internship programme that provides school-based training, mentoring, and professional development to aspiring teachers while they complete their B,Ed, degree online.
Complementing our funding drive, GTI will be encouraging conversations beyond October 5th on how to create awareness on teacher issues: How do we ensure that teacher respect is part of everyday? Is enough being done to acknowledge our teachers?
The World Teachers Day, make your pledge to become part of our movement to create teachers with the capacity and vision to be educational leaders and pioneers, and to excite young people to join the profession by facilitating young teachers into leadership.
