March 14, 2023, 10:21 AM
March 14, 2023, 10:21 AM
Jacqueline Kalule Kutesa is the principal of St. James Secondary School in the Jinja district of Uganda. She, like many directors, has had a hard time recruiting in the past. “Anyone can say that she is a teacher, or have been part of the faculty thanks to her skills and practice, but without having adopted the appropriate systems,” she explains.
Soon, Jacqueline will stop dealing with this problem, since the Government is doing concrete progress on the centralization, digitization and harmonization of teacher certification.
A study prepared by Unesco (TIISA) detected problems due to the quantity and quality of teachers. In 2019, the Government, with the support of the Unesco CapED Programdeveloped a Teaching Management Information System (TMIS).
The system allows the management of information contained in a register of teachers in an agile and fast way. For principals like Jacqueline, this means that all HR teams in schools will be able to check the validity of prospective teachers’ documentation using the TMIS online verification tool. “TMIS will help us get real teachers,” said Jacqueline in a report shared on the Unesco website.
The country’s educational authorities make every effort to consolidate this platform (TMIS) with quality data from different sources. The Government uses this information collected to make political decisions based on reliable, timely data and produced internally.
With an increasing number of teachers registered on the platform, Uganda will have visibility into the total number of qualified teachers in the country and how they are distributed. Ministry staff will then be able to use the data to help make informed decisions about educational plans and resource allocation.
Till the date, more than 200,000 teachers from the public and private sectors They have registered on the TMIS platform. The platform allows you to have an account, download documents and, finally, access electronic registration certificates, as well as how to verify the information of future teachers.
Ananias Semusu, president of the Kawempe private school owners, praised the creation of TMIS, noting that the system will have profound repercussions on the lives of the dozens. “The TMIS creates a database of teachers who are qualified but have not yet been hired, to which the Ministry of Education can turn in case of a shortage of teachers.”
The Teacher Education and Training Department (TETD) is aware of the value of the platform and made a commitment to give priority to teachers identified as lead trainers in order to enable them to properly deliver regional training courses.
