Education headed for crisis as AIDS strikes teachers

Education in Tanzania faces a looming crisis after government recently revealed that the sector is in danger of losing more than 27,000 teachers to HIV/AIDS by 2020. "The impact of HIV/AIDS on education, just as in other sectors, such as health [or] the economy, is serious," local government minister Mizengo Pinda told a recent HIV/AIDS workshop in Morogoro, some 300km west of the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam. For the past four years free primary education has caused the student teacher ratio to rise every year, but the impact of HIV/AIDS-related deaths and morbidity among the teaching corps has been creating even bigger classes. Tanzania's 200,000 teachers make up roughly half the country's civil servants. If the current levels of infection and prevalence remained constant, Pinda noted, 14,460 primary school teachers would die in the next four years, or around 3,600 teachers per year. The country has the capacity to train 1,200 teachers annually. He said the government-financed free education programme risked stalling unless the spread of the pandemic among teachers was checked. Most teachers in the country are in the 20 to 45 year age range, the most productive time of life. According to Kajubi Mukajanga, a researcher with HakiElimu, a non-governmental organisation that acts as a sounding board for the government's policies on education, the rise in HIV infection among teachers was mainly due to low pay, poor conditions of service and the high cost and scarcity of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for those already infected. "A government teacher earns 140,000 shillings [US$120] per month. They are supposed to be among the well-informed members of society, but their meagre pay does not allow them to invest in information," said Mukajanga. "The long distances between the villages, where most teachers work, and health centres make it even more difficult for a teacher to attend HIV/AIDS clinics or go for testing." Recent research findings by both the government and NGOs estimate that the country has a shortfall of 56,000 teachers. A 2004/05 government assessment of the free education system found that awareness campaigns have so far done little to slow down the pandemic. "The infected teachers, even when they discover that they have contracted the virus, are forced to go on long sick leaves because they cannot afford to buy life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs," Mukajanga explained. "Neither do they know where to find them [ARVs], even when they can afford the cost." Although civic authorities were given funds to train school committees in subjects ranging from HIV/AIDS awareness to good governance, "there is not much clear evidence on the quality of training or on the outcomes transforming the perceptions of the school committees". "As of now, Tanzania is still a very rural society. Without proper information and diagnosis of the cause of deaths, people still believe HIV/AIDS is a curse that can be undone by a witchdoctor," said Mukajanga. Pinda said the government needed to spend nearly $507,000 annually to replace teachers who left employment through death, illness or retirement. Nearly two million Tanzanians are living with HIV/AIDS, but just 27,000 are currently on subsidised antiretroviral therapy.