UNICEF set to train more teachers

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) is set to train at least 29,000 Angolan school teachers by the end of this year. "After three decades of war, no one denies that there is a shortage of qualified teachers - we are constantly running workshops to train teachers," UNICEF spokesman James Elder told IRIN. Of the 29,000 teachers hired recently by the Angolan Ministry of Education, 20,000 had only a sixth-grade education and needed additional training. In the last quarter, UNICEF trained 10,500 teachers, 44 provincial trainers and 466 municipal trainers across 11 provinces. Elder said the Angolan government had pumped in US $40 million to hire the additional 29,000 teachers, but there were other challenges, including the provision of infrastructure and learning material such as textbooks. The government's "Back to School" campaign has yielded results - an additional one million children enrolled for classes this year. "With almost two million children in schools, we were faced with the situation whether we should wait another five years for trained teachers to emerge from universities, or act now and provide training to the teachers we had and ensure the children get to school," Elder explained. The opportunity to attend school brought a "sense of normalcy to the children and gives them a routine and a place to go to every morning," he added.