# **1. Introduction**

The majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have struggled to make meaningful progress in deploying and retaining teachers to, and retaining them in, schools located in impoverished and hard-to-reach communities. Majgaard and Mingat <u>(2012) find large disparities in per-student</u> spending in schools in countries within the region. Since most countries spend 80-90% of resources on teachers, the uneven pattern of spending reflects a weak relationship between the number of teachers and number of students in a school. Unsurprisingly, learning outcomes have stagnated in these countries, even while the amount of resources spent on education in the African continent has increased (Filmer et al., 2015). The increased spending has gone to relatively advantaged schools, leaving the large majority of children in these countries with overcrowded classrooms and too few teachers – or, in extreme cases, no teachers at all. Evidence from cross-country comparisons of learning outcomes suggests that countries which have improved their overall learning outcomes have typically done so by focusing attention on the lowest performing students and addressing inequities in school quality (Crouch and Rolleston, 2015).

These disparities in staffing may reflect the effect of teacher preferences in school choice on teacher distribution. The socioeconomic status of a school, access to amenities, and students’ <u>profiles also seem to matter in the school-choice decisions of a teacher (Barbieri et al., 2011; Hanushek et al., 2004; Ingersoll and May, 2012). In the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, where</u> access to amenities in remote areas can be extremely limited, teachers demonstrate a strong preference for postings in or near large settlements (Mulkeen, 2010). In a fully functioning education system, teacher management policies are expected to institutionalize frameworks to manage teacher preferences for less remote postings and produce an equitable allocation of teachers nationally. The level and persistence of disparities in teacher allocation suggest an institutional failure to develop teacher management systems that can target deployments and retain teachers in hardship areas.

Leveraging advances in technology and drawing insights from teacher-level databases, governments can strategically identify schools with severe shortages of teachers, proactively manage assignment of new teachers, and provide incentives matched to the level of hardship, by computing a precise estimate using geo-spatial data. This requires investments in active management of databases, equipping district managers with the tools and guidance to assign teachers, and alignment of incentives of all system-level actors to enforce rules, objectively drawn from various data sets. Previously, governments have failed in their attempts to improve deployments for lack of credible, reliable and timely data to support teacher assignment, and inability to come up with objective metrics to fully price out the hardship in teachers’ choice of schools.

Like other failures of public service management in developing countries, persistent problems in teacher management can typically be traced not only to system-level failures to develop mechanisms to target and retain teachers effectively, but also to contestation between different <u>actors within the system with different incentives to support or resist reforms to improve services</u> (World Bank, 2004; <u>Booth, 2012). In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, politically organized</u> teachers have taken a significant proportion of seats in the state assembly, using these positions to improve their own benefits while resisting reform (Kingdon and Muzammil, 2009).

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