One of WAZA ALLIANCE goals is to:
-Improve teacher education in Sub-Saharan Africa by:
Bridging the gap between current elementary teacher generation and the future teacher generation.
Providing the Waza Teacher Training Seminars in content curricular areas and classroom management.
Certifying teachers and helping them to become leaders in areas where they show mastery of knowledge and skills.
Encouraging work ethics.
The teacher/ student ratio can be as high as 70/1. A poorly trained teacher has a negative impact on quite a great number of students. Invariably, a teacher who has access to professional development has a great positive impact on 70 students at one time.
The highest degree required to become an elementary teacher in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a high school diploma. While there is no prospect of ensuring that elementary teachers access higher education in a short term, WAZA ALLIANCE FOR QUALITY EDUCATION would like to be the bridge between the current generation of elementary teachers and the future generation. WAZA ALLIANCE intends to provide college level courses in content curricular development, teaching methods, assessment methods, crowded classroom management and so forth.
WAZA ALLIANCE’s approach is to provide training to all participant teachers. Those who demonstrate mastery of the topics discussed during the seminar, following the results of an evaluation, will become trainers. They will be foundation for the expansion of the training program. They will obtain all necessary support in order to deliver instructions to their students and to provide support to their colleagues in their respective schools.
It is estimated that the achievement of the educational millennium development goal of universal primary education by the year 2015 will depend on the recruitment of 18 million new teachers across the world. Sub-Saharan Africa faces the greatest challenge where the total number of teachers will have to increase by 68%, requiring an inflow of 3.8 million teachers (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2006:45)
The first seminar has been delivered in summer 2008. Seventy-one teachers from 13 schools attended. The topics that were discussed include the methods for teaching math and science and school profiling. To learn more about the seminar, please click here.
WAZA ALLIANCE intends to run another WTTS during summer 2009. The participants will be the same teachers who attended the summer 2008 session. Topics that maybe developed include a comparison of the national math curriculum, the history of the education system and a discussion on the language of instruction.
One of WAZA ALLIANCE goals is to:
Help improve school management in public schools in SSA by:
1. Increasing efficiency.
2. Helping manage school data. One of the purposes is to create a culture of inclusion, rather than exclusion of the socio-economically challenged families. Schools can be repressive machines. WAZA ALLIANCE FOR QUALITY EDUCATION would like for schools to use attendance data to determine how to improve the drop out rate, not how to determine who should be left out.
One of the WAZA ALLIANCE’s tools that will facilitate the management of the public schools is the WAZA Information and Comm
unications Technology Plan (WICTP). The plan will ensure that all forms of technologies are available to the school community and that schools become interconnected.
The by-product of the implementation of the WSMI and the WICTP is the Waza Sister School Partnerships (WSSP). Schools within a country and outside the African continent will be able to exchange ideas and interact.
One of WAZA ALLIANCE goals is to:
Ensure enrollment and completion of education cycles, particularly the elementary education cycle, for the vulnerable K-12 under-served learners.
WAZA ALLIANCE defines the vulnerable children as those who might not be able to enroll, perhaps survive till they complete an education cycle. WAZA will pay particular attention to children who are first generation primary education attendees. This initiative will be activated as soon as WAZA ALLIANCE is able to make a survey and identified the children according to the profile described above, or according to specific needs. Those needs may include the fact that children have actually dropped out of school.
Faustin, the WAZA Alliance president, contemplating a teacher’s desk.
On e of WAZA ALLIANCE goals is to:
Help develop curriculum resources and assessment tools by:
Engaging teachers in developing alternative resources. These include more basal readers, supplemental activity books and alternative assessment tools. Assessment tools will be closely managed by WAZA ALLIANCE FOR QUALITY EDUCATION, INC.
Click on the resources below. They are in French and are being developed to reflect the national curriculum of the countries involved with Waza Alliance, currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo.