Teachers and Malawi’s development goals: Thoughts for World Teachers Day 2022

It’s only Wednesday, but it has been a busy week in Malawi’s education space. On Sunday 2^nd October the Minister of Education, Hon. Agnes NyaLonje and the Executive Secretary of the Malawi National Examinations Board (MANEB), Professor Dorothy Nampota, released the results of the 2022 Primary School Leaving Certificate of Education (PSLCE) examinations. The next day, on Monday 3^rd October the Ministry announced that it would be recruiting 4,125 auxiliary teachers from the Initial Primary Teacher Education (IPTE) Cohort 13, and some from cohort 14. And today, 5^th October, is World Teachers Day. Social media worldwide and in Malawi has been awash with messages of celebratory goodwill for teachers.

The most dominant news in Malawi, however, has been the PSLCE results and the two top performers, a girl and a boy, who both got 448 points out of 500. Mirriam Kachala, 13, is from Chipiloni Primary School in Zomba, and Joseph Magombo, 12, is from Nankhaka Primary School in Lilongwe. Their secondary education will be supported by scholarships from Press Trust Limited. Other well-wishers have also been donating sums of money to support the two students beyond secondary school.

Mirriam Kachala. Photo from Ministry of Education. 

Joseph Magombo. Photo from Ministry of Education

Many were pleasantly surprised to learn that out of the 260,295 students who sat the exam, 216,664 passed, representing 83.24 percent. Many were equally dismayed to learn that only 89,404 students have been selected to public secondary schools, representing 41.62 percent, an improvement of 4 percent over last year’s selection rate of 37 percent. The pass rate for girls (78.33 percent) is ten percent lower than boys (88.21 percent), while the pass rate for special needs students (72.85 percent) is 11 percent lower than the other students.  

This year’s cohort entered Standard One in the 2014-2015 academic year. The 2015 Education Statistics Bulletin indicates that there were 1,061,868 learners in Standard One in that year. 

The math shows that 801,573 learners did not make it to Standard 8, having dropped out, or having been held back to repeat. That represents 75 percent of the cohort. Put differently, three out of four learners who entered Standard One in 2014-2015 did not make it to Standard 8 by the year 2022. These are disturbing numbers, but they are not new. We already know, from the 2018 Population and Housing Census, that amongst our 14-17 year olds, the official secondary school age, three out of four are not in school.

The numbers will improve in the near future, owing to a number of projects in the education sector. The Secondary Education Expansion for Development (SEED) project, funded by USAID, is constructing and expanding 250 secondary schools. Assuming that 250 new secondary schools were constructed today, and each accommodated 600 new students, we would improve secondary school enrolment by 150,000, which would be enough to accommodate all the 127,000 Standard 8 learners who have not been selected to secondary school this year. More secondary schools are being constructed and expanded through other projects also, including the European Union-funded Improving Secondary Education in Malawi (ISEM) II, and the World Bank-funded Equity with Quality Learning at Secondary (EQUALS) project. As I observed in an earlier piece, progress has been an issue, and there have been substantial delays.

The news announced on Monday, about the recruitment of 4,125 auxiliary teachers to go into primary schools, did not receive the same enthusiasm as the release of the PSLCE results. Auxiliary teachers are slowly becoming the norm as the government is unable to recruit full time teachers. This should not be allowed to continue. As of August this year, 17,438 primary school teachers have been trained, from IPTE Cohort 13 which graduated in 2020, to Cohort 16, which sat their final examinations in August 2022. The government is unable to recruit these teachers on a full time basis largely due to a wage bill cap that is part of a policy regimen of conditionalities that come with the Extended Credit Facility that Malawi is negotiating with the International Monetary Fund.

The public only gets snippets of the ongoing negotiations, making it difficult to know exactly why the government needs to observe particular conditionalities. Memories of 2011 and 2012 are still fresh in the minds of many, when then President Bingu wa Mutharika openly disagreed with the IMF on conditionalities. We all know what happened to the Malawi economy, and there have been near reminisces lately.

Today, on World Teachers Day, it is important to think about the role of teachers towards achieving Malawi’s national goals. During the recent United Nations General Assembly summit in New York, world leaders made pledges towards transforming education in their countries and globally. Most pledges made mentioned the central role of teachers. Malawi’s President Dr. Lazarus Chakwera presented a Statement of Malawi’s commitments, which included making education mandatory for every child from early childhood through to secondary education. The Government of Malawi, through the President, also pledged, among others, to ensure 100 percent enrollment rate in primary school, 100 percent primary school completion rate, 100 percent transition rate to secondary school, and 100 percent secondary school completion rate.

It is difficult to imagine how Malawi's commitments to transforming education can be fulfilled without adequate teachers in primary and secondary school. As enrollments improve, as they are expected to, more and more young people will be in school, and more and more teachers will be needed to teach them. There has to be a solution to the impasse caused by the IMF conditionalities, otherwise we should forget about achieving any of the education goals by 2030, or, let alone, 2063.

 

 

What drives Malawian teachers: Thoughts on World Teachers Day 2017

In mid-September, some three weeks ago, I was home in Ntcheu for ziliza (unveiling tombstones for departed relations). I used the occasion to stop by Chikande Primary School, where I started my teaching career. I taught there from January 1990 to July 1993. 

I entered the first classroom I taught in, which was Standard 2 at the time but is now Standard 3. It was unlocked, and I saw that it now has a cement floor. There was no cement floor in 1990, just a mud floor that the students swept daily and moistened weekly.

As we were waiting for the ziliza ceremony to start, a man beckoned to me to go and sit next to him. I needed to go and announce my arrival to other relations, so I motioned to him that I would see him later. He came up to me after the ceremony and wondered if I remembered him. I did not. “You taught me in Standard 3 at Chikande,” he said, and mentioned his name.

I instantly remembered him. That had been twenty-six years ago. He was now a fully grown man. The next person who came to also remind me that I taught him was unmistakable. He too was now a fully grown man but had changed very little. I even remembered his name before he could remind me. Both men went up to Standard 8 at the school, left school, and raised families. They became subsistence farmers.

At the school, save for the cement floor, and a new structure being constructed on the edge of the school forest, very little has changed in the twenty-four years since I left. But the area now has a community day secondary school. In those days the only secondary school in the entire district was Ntcheu.

Bilira had a long running distance education centre which provided an alternative secondary school opportunity to those not selected to Ntcheu, but it was not the same as being selected. There were successive years when no one was selected to a secondary school from Chikande. In lucky years, one would be selected. In luckier years, two.

When I left Chikande in 1993, I went to teach at Gunde, near Khwisa, on the Ntcheu-Balaka border. I stayed there for one term only, before leaving to go and work at the Malawi Institute of Education (MIE). From MIE I proceeded for further studies in teacher education, my current professional and academic occupation.

Most of my students at the Catholic University of Malawi, where I currently am, are student teachers who are either preparing to go into the teaching profession, or are experienced teachers upgrading from a primary teacher’s certificate to a university diploma or degree. Some are already teaching in secondary schools, but those teaching in primary school will soon leave to teach in secondary school upon completion of their studies.

The Catholic University of Malawi’s Faculty of Education offers a weekend option in addition to its residential programme. Teachers arrive on Friday evening, attend classes on Saturday and Sunday, and return to their duty stations on late Sunday afternoon or Monday morning. Some come from as far as Nsanje in the south, and others from as far as Nkhotakota. Colleagues talk about this one teacher who used to come from Chitipa.

These teachers are driven by what once drove me when I was a classroom teacher. I was driven by a desire for higher education. The prestige that comes with higher qualifications was a big factor, but an even bigger factor was the fleeting glimpse of the greater knowledge that lay out there beyond the curriculum we were working with. I see this desire in the teachers who are upgrading today.

They are hoping to escape the dead-end of what life has become for many Malawian primary school teachers. But they are also craving for deeper knowledge of curriculum, pedagogy and research so they can become better teachers. The career path in our country’s primary teacher professional development trajectory is yet to catch up with the desires of these teachers. We remain stuck in a mentality that regards primary education as deserving of only bare, minimum, basic qualifications, and not deeper academic and pedagogical knowledge offered at a university level.

Thus these teachers get their university diplomas and degrees, and the only way to recognise their new qualifications is to send them to teach in secondary schools. Primary schools are thus deprived of better qualified and educated teachers because the system operates on the premise that only secondary schools deserves such teachers. Even the National Strategy for Teacher Education and Development (NSTED), the ten-year policy plan that has guided teacher education and development in this country since 2008, and expires this year, is cognisant of this conundrum. It offers no direct solution.

Talking about policies, we are a nation that specialises in well-developed and expertly articulated plans at the national level. When it comes to implementation, you would be forgiven for concluding that the policies were developed for another planet. This has become the bane of our developmental aspirations. And we do not spend enough time analysing the root causes underlying our failure to implement our plans.

To the extent that when Oxfam held public discussions around its 2016 report on inequality in Malawi, titled A Dangerous Divide, one of the report’s co-authors, Dr. Richard Mussa (RIP), suggested that what Malawi needed was not a National Planning Commission. Rather, what Malawi needed was a National Implementation Commission.

We have ended up with a National Planning Commission, all the same. The nation is waiting, with bated breath, what direction the commission will take the country into. Even more importantly, the nation is waiting to see what new ideas the commission will bring that will transform Malawi into a nation that implements it policies.

Giving a keynote address at a land governance and research conference at the University of Malawi Polytechnic in September, Professor Blessings Chinsinga shared an anecdote what made everyone in the audience wince. A Malawi government delegation is said to have visited Rwanda to learn some lessons in development from the Rwandans. This happened not too long ago.

Opening the meeting, a Rwandan minister wondered why Malawi was coming to learn from Rwanda. After all, Rwanda visited Malawi several years ago, and borrowed Malawi’s Vision 2020. The same anecdote has also been shared about Singapore, who also came to learn from Malawi some decades ago, and today they are so developed they are at par with the so-called developed countries.

We need to exert energy and expend time examining the planning-implementation discrepancy. One possible explanation is what I see as the socially constructed gap between the educated elites and the rest of the population. This is a gap resulting from restricted access to education, best illustrated through numbers of people who survive the education system and those who do not. I have discussed these numbers on this blog before, but it helps to rehash them.

Annual enrolment in Standard one has approached the one million threshold over the last eight years. However by Standard eight, only 250,000 or thereabouts survive the eight-year cycle. Of these, about 100,000 will find space in public and private secondary schools, in conventional and alternative programmes.

From a population of about 5 million learners in primary schools, our secondary school enrolment is no more than 400,000. It gets even narrower at the tertiary level, where it is less than 50,000, to use a generous estimate. To put this in perspective, this year, the four public universities took in 4,600 students.  

These enrolment trends are historical. For much of the colonial and missionary era, the emphasis was on primary education only. There was no secondary school in Malawi until 1941. Even after independence in 1964, despite massive enrolments both in primary and secondary, the rate of increase was not enough to bring drastic, far-reaching changes to the social landscape.

The result is that as of 2016, only 30 percent of Malawians aged 15 and above have attained a secondary school education. the majority, 70 percent, have not. Therein lies one possible explanation for the chasm that characterises the elitism of policymaking and the absence of implementation.

Another possible explanation comes from Dan Banik and Blessings Chinsinga in their 2016 book, titled Political Transition and Inclusive Development in Malawi: The Democratic Dividend. The two professors of public policy, who co-edited the book, argue that Malawi’s institutional characteristics and requirements for development on the one hand, and democracy on the other, are pulling in opposite directions.

In other words, there is a contradiction between our development aspirations and our political practice. Again, this needs further analytical discussion, but as can be seen from how political parties behave when they are in government, political interests overshadow development interests. But these are effects, rather than causes.  

What does this all have to do with the education system, you may be wondering. A lot, I argue. Particularly when we think of World Teachers Day today and its theme, Teaching in Freedom, Empowering Teachers. UNESCO have pointed out that teachers are key to achieving the 2030 Education Agenda, if not the whole SDG agenda itself. Several memes shared on social media today have carried the message that teaching is the “profession that creates all other professions.”

In Malawi, teachers are repeatedly told about how much they are valued, but that is how far it goes. A quintessential moment was when President Peter Mutharika inaugurated Chiradzulu Teachers’ College on 16^th September 2015. Said the president:

We must provide teachers with necessary resources and respect them because teaching is the mother of all professions. My government wants to make sure that teachers also live a good life like Engineers, lawyers and doctors as a way of motivating them to mould our children’s future with dedication. Let us be people who raise the flag of our standards very high. We deserve the best and must aspire to be at our best. Education is where we begin the making of a nation.

That was 2015, and this is 2017. It is not the last time teachers will hear these sentiments. They have become woven into the rhetoric that forms part of the policy-implementation discrepancy. Thus our education system is ensnared in the complex maze of excellent policies that remain unimplemented.

My students and I marked World Teachers Day today with an educational visit to the Providence Industrial Mission, in Chiradzulu, some 13 kilometres from campus. 

We spent the afternoon touring around PIM and learning about the educational aspirations and achievements of Reverend John Chilembwe. We sat in a classroom at the primary school and listened to a lecture by a primary school teacher, Mr George Nasolo. Mr Nasolo has extensively studied and researched John Chilembwe and the PIM.  I wrote about him in an earlier blog, in January this year.

He is one Malawian teacher who has sought to teach Malawians about John Chilembwe based on empirical evidence obtained from sources that knew Chilembwe and lived in his times. Many of these sources have since passed on, but there is a lot of material that still fascinates audiences.

Mr Nasolo is one example of many Malawian teachers who are talented and have the capacity to produce remarkable knowledge. These are teachers who have the potential to transform the knowledge landscape of this country; teachers who are pursuing intellectual freedom and empowerment in a fractured policy-implementation climate. They are driven by a craving for higher education, and deeper knowledge, for their students and communities. The same cravings that drove me nearly three decades ago.

Empowering teachers: Thoughts on World Teachers’ Day 2015

When he officially opened Malawi’s newest teacher training college, Chiradzulu TTC, on 16th September, Malawi’s president Peter Mutharika said something that if he does not follow up on with action, might shadow his legacy in Malawian education. It is something I have decided not to cynically dismiss as one of those things presidents say and never mean it.

Today is 5^th October, the day the world commemorates and celebrates teachers every year. I want to use the occasion to reflect on the state of the teaching profession in Malawi, and in parts of the world where teachers’ issues have been in the news lately. I want to discuss the implications of the promises President Mutharika made to Malawian teachers in September, and to draw attention to issues that now impinge on the teaching profession globally. Continental momentum, in the form of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, and a global imperative in the form of the newly launched Sustainable Development Goals give teachers new ideals to aspire to and to inspire their students with.

Now back to President Mutharika. The Official Malawi Government Online facebook page quoted the president as saying: “We must provide teachers with necessary resources and respect them because teaching is the mother of all professions.” Nyasatimes quoted him thus: “My government wants to make sure that teachers also live a good life like Engineers, lawyers and doctors as a way of motivating them to mould our children’s future with dedication.” He added: “Let us be people who raise the flag of our standards very high. We deserve the best and must aspire to be at our best. Education is where we begin the making of a nation.”

Mr President, these are solemn, loaded, heavy, pregnant words. If you will not do anything to make sure that what you have promised actually happens, these words will ring hollow in the minds of Malawian teachers. And they will be a yardstick against which to judge your legation in Malawi’s education.

There is enough precedence to view the president’s words as another of those speeches presidents give, powered with high-falutin profound-sounding words without meaning to do anything about the promise. We have heard these things before too many times it would be folly to imagine that this time the president is serious. It was probably a scripted speech, written by someone within the Ministry of Education, if not the minister himself. But I am choosing to take the president up on his word for one simple reason.

Amongst Malawi’s numerous priorities, in ranking order of more pressing priorities within the highest priorities, changing the status of the teaching profession ranks, for me, as of the utmost importance when thinking of long term national development plans. It is so important that it does not matter to me that the president may have made yet another empty promise using this very language.

There are four or so countries in the world that have actually made this happen: raise the profile of the teaching profession into a highly prized, prestigious one. The best known country for this is Finland. South Korea, China and Singapore are also spoken of in similar terms, but Finland is the best known example (I initially included Japan on this list, but a Japanese academic, who is also a friend and former classmate, said that was no longer the case). In Africa, Zimbabwe gets the trophy.

Although the countries I am mentioning here are far advanced and far wealthier than Malawi, perhaps with the exception of Zimbabwe, debatably, it is their investments not just in education, but in the teaching profession, that has been central to their advancement. They did not all start out wealthy and developed. They worked toward it. Although ours is a different context, with different resources and circumstances, I do not see why we cannot study these countries to see what they did, what we can learn from them, and what we can ignore.

As Finland’s most prominent educationist, Professor Pasi Sahlberg, has explained, Finland learned a lot from other countries, particularly the American education system. But their learning was on the terms of the Finnish people, such that they were able to develop a Finnish education system that today surpasses the American education system.

One of the most important things Finland did to turn around a mediocre education system into a world class one was to change the way they educate and reward their teachers. To qualify as a primary school teacher in Finland (and in a few other wealthy countries), the minimum requirement is a masters’ degree in education. And they do not accept into their teacher education programmes just anyone. Candidates are subjected to a rigorous process that culminates into an interview, where prospective teachers must articulate their life philosophy and express a deeper perspective about why they would like to become a teacher. Many, very bright and promising, fail.

So selective is the process, according to Professor Sahlberg, that teaching is the most sought after programme in the Finnish education system. Contrast that with many other countries, including Malawi and the United States, where the most prestigious university programmes are medicine, law, finance and engineering. Education ranks at the bottom.

The result of such highly specialised teacher education is that Finland puts a lot professional and intellectual responsibility into the teacher’s hands rather than into the hands of the authorities. In Professor Sahlberg’s words, the Finnish system believes in teacher responsibility rather than teacher accountability. He says accountability is what remains when responsibility has been removed.

Finnish students enter school and go all the way to the penultimate year of secondary school without sitting a national examination. The only examination they sit is at the end of secondary school. This is deliberately designed so as to remove the pressure of teaching to the test and give teacher the space to be creative and give each child the attention and support they deserve.

Recently, Professor Sahlberg has expressed worry that the success of the Finnish education system may be in jeopardy. The Finnish government  has adopted austerity measures and is planning to implement cuts in the national budget, including education. Finnish teachers recently joined other public workers in a nation-wide strike to protest against the cuts.

A recent upsurge in teacher accountability has changed the teaching profession around the world. Students are now being subjected to too many tests whose results are purported to reflect a teacher’s performance. As a result teachers are now being dictated to by examinations, teaching to the test and taking away the creativity that classrooms need for an education system to excel.

This is happening in many countries around the world. In South Africa, Professor Jonathan Jansen, Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State and a leading educational thinker on the continent, says teachers are now “preparing young people for examinations rather than for deep and meaningful learning in the subject.” He argues that the country’s Annual National Assessments, which have recently become a bone of contention between the government and teachers’ unions, “distort the purposes of education at the bottom end of the system.”

This trend is happening including in the developed world. When Nancy Atwell, an American teacher of reading and writing, was announced as the winner of the $1 million 2015 Global Teacher Prize, the first time the award has been given, she lamented what has befallen the teaching profession in her country. In remarks that stirred a debate amongst Americans, Ms Atwell said she would not encourage youngAmericans to join the teaching profession in the state it is today. Perhaps in the private schools yes, but definitely not in the public education system. “If you’re a creative, smart young person, I don’t think this is the time to go into teaching.”

The Global Teacher Prize is considered to be the Nobel Prize for Teaching, so Ms Atwell’s words were greeted with shock and amazement by some. In August this year a teacher in the state of Michigan announced she was quitting teaching in the public education system to teach at a private school. She titled her essay, published on the Huffington Post, “Why I can no longer teach in public education.”

In the same month of August, Motoko Rich of the New York Times reported that between 2010 and 2014 enrolment into teacher preparation programmes dropped by30 percent across the United States. Worse still, 40 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Stories like these are becoming common around the world.

Last Saturday 3^rd October the British newspaper The Independent reported on a survey done for the National Union of Teachers (NUT) that revealed that 53 percent of teachers in Britain are contemplating quitting the profession in the next two years. The top three reasons are “excessive workloads, poor pay and low morale.”

It would be interesting to know what the numbers look like for the teaching profession in Malawi or on the African continent. The only exception might be in countries where unemployment is so bad that quitting a job in hand is not an option. This happens to be the case in countries where unemployment is indeed very high and teachers remain in the teaching profession only because they have nowhere else to go. High unemployment is now becoming a global problem, affecting even the wealthiest of countries.

Such teachers only teach because they have no choice. Otherwise, they hate the job and everything to do with it. Such a scenario is very unfortunate because it is innocent children who get the brunt of these teachers’ anger and frustrations. Elephants fighting and the grass getting pulverised. Often things get to this point when teachers feel that they have nowhere to go to air their grievances; nobody is listening. Right now, that is how the majority of teachers feel, in Malawi and in much of the world.

The theme for the 2015 World Teachers Day is “Empowering teachers, building sustainable societies.” Another very powerful-sounding phrase, only if it can be put into action. It is such a gratifying, highly motivating theme, one that demonstrates the seriousness with which the teaching profession needs to be taken. We know societies where this is taken seriously, as earlier discussed. With the newly launched Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), sustainability has become such a powerful word, as Chiku Malunga has observed.

In Malawi, as in many countries, we have been lagging behind in terms of recognising the importance of teacher empowerment.  While much of southern Africa has improved the minimum qualifications of teachers, involving universities in the education of teachers, in Malawi primary school teachers are trained in a way that can only be described as hap-hazard.

A two-year certificate, one year spent in college and one year in a classroom. There is very little academic rigour involved. The effort has been there to enhance primary teacher education and involve the universities, but it has been slow, halting, and uncoordinated. Things have picked up in recent years, and we are on the verge of a significant change.

It might be that President Mutharika’s words have been uttered at a propitious moment when the Ministry of Education has been thinking along the same lines, but it is a moment that must not be missed. At the continental level, the discourse is about the renewal of Africa; a rebirth of the continent; an African Renaissance. The African Union has launched an ambitious 50-year plan, to run from 2013 to 2063, known as Agenda2063. Africans are slowly getting to learn about this agenda.

Although Agenda 2063 has very little in terms of strategy (it's not meant to be), it is a dream that perfectly captures “the Africa we want”, as is expressed in the document’s subtitle. I have argued elsewhere, and want to reiterate the assertion here, that Agenda 2063 and the African Renaissance will not be realised without the involvement of teachers. And this is where the importance of teachers who are highly educated, genuinely motivated and meaningfully empowered becomes poignant.

Agenda 2063 needs to be adopted into not just national development plans, but into educational policy and school curricula as well. That way, teachers will teach and students will learn inspired by a long-term Pan-African vision and spurred on by the dream of a better Africa whose planning and enactment start today. Only empowered teachers can understand and implement such a policy.

Empowerment, as one of my mentors taught me years ago, is not something someone hands to you. It is something one takes upon oneself. Teachers should not sit and wait for someone to come and empower them. They should empower themselves by organising themselves, speaking out on things that matter, and showing their students how to make learning problem-based and community-building.

As I have also argued elsewhere, Agenda 2063 needs to be translated into local African languages so as to enable ordinary Africans, the majority of whom do not speak English, to own it and make it part of their aspirations. As Cheikh Anta Diop pointed out in 1948, and as Ngugi wa Thiong’o has more recently stated, there cannot be a renaissance without the involvement of African languages. And as Kwesi Prah said in 2013, “No country can make progress on the basis of a borrowed language.”

This is not to say we must abandon Western languages, no. We need them. We have invested so much in them already, and continue, as I am doing this very moment. But we must equally invest in African languages so as to allow the majority of Africans, ninety percent of whom do not speak a Western language, to participate in the renewal. It cannot be the case that there is no indigenous genius in African villages unless one speaks a Western language. There can be no African Renaissance without the talents, creativity and brilliance of ordinary Africans being unleashed and expressed in their own languages.

The role of teachers in this endeavour will be pivotal. The best educated teachers serve as thought leaders and community enablers. They inspire young people by their knowledge of subject matter content as well as their intellectual curiosity about the world and its future. They impart to their students ethical standards (uMunthu/uBuntu) and a problem-solving ethos.

In other words, they embody the message in the words President Mutharika used when he was opening Chiradzulu Teachers College: “Teaching is the mother of all professions … Education is where we begin the making of a nation.” They may be empty, high-falutin, meaningless words spoken by every president, but they come at a time when teacher empowerment is becoming an ideal that can claim a central place in the rebirth of the Pan-African world.

As the SDGs kick into action, replacing the unachieved MDGs, President Mutharika has been appointed to serve as a co-convener on the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, chaired by former British Prime Minister and UN Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown.

Other co-conveners are the Norwegian Prime Minister, Erna Solberg, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, and UNESCO Director General, Irina Bokovo. The International Commission itself is made up of more than twenty world leaders, who include five former presidents and prime ministers and three Nobel laureates.

As the world celebrates teachers today, the words of President Peter Mutharika that "teaching is the mother of all professions" send an echo to all world leaders. The teachers of the world are not sitting and watching, waiting to be "empowered." They are empowering themselves. Happy World Teachers Day!