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Helena Awurusa attended the Third Commonwealth Teacher Research Symposium held in Maputo, Mozambique from 19-21 February, 2008. The theme for this year was, ‘Gender, HIV/AIDS and the Status of Teachers’.

1. What are the major challenges to Education for All in Ghana and what impact has HIV/AIDS had on the education sector?

We have had some new educational reforms, where our government has made it possible to feed children in school and this has brought an increase in the numbers attending school. In only one class you can get as many as 100 children to a class with only 1 teacher. Because of this, unqualified teachers have been employed, often people who have recently finished high school and receive no teacher training before going into the classroom. This is a big challenge we are facing. Then we come to HIV/AIDS, hitherto we may have thought our teachers were not so affected by HIV and AIDS because when it comes to the education sector in Ghana there was little data. Under the EFAIDS programme we were able to do a research study that shows that teachers are also affected by HIV and AIDS. If we do not look at how to prevent HIV and AIDS amongst teachers we are going to run into problems - already because of the new reforms more teachers are needed. Internal migration is also having a big impact. Because of the low salaries and unfavourable conditions many teachers are leaving the classrooms to take up jobs in other sectors, there is a demotivation for teaching.

2. How are GNAT and the Teachers and Education Workers’ Union (TEWU) working to combat HIV/AIDS and promote Education for All?

This will be a year of advocacy backed up by research. We are working out strategies to retain teachers in the classroom; we feel that the conditions under which teachers teach should be better. We want to complete a study on internal migration to other sectors as well as emigration out of Ghana. We also want to establish the fact that our teachers are affected by HIV and AIDS and we have gathered data to support this. Ghana is one of the few countries in Africa where you still pay for treatment, we want this to change. We believe there should be free access to treatment for teachers who are HIV positive – when teachers are healthy, they are in the classroom and contributing to education. In Accra, we have a counselling centre where teachers can seek help for problems, including HIV and AIDS related problems, that are keeping them outside the classroom and not making them effective. The service is working well, it has expanded to five districts and we hope to open more.

3. How has participating in the Commonwealth Teacher Research Symposium helped your work on the EFAIDS programme in Ghana?

One thing in particular I took away was that no country should be complacent – just because you do not have figures, you should not feel that HIV is non-existent. It also made me realise that if nothing is done when teachers are migrating, then it will affect the whole educational sector. Before, for us in Ghana that was not a priority area. We had teachers leaving the sector, leaving the country but we never discussed it, never investigated the situation. We train so many teachers yet we still have 20,000 vacancies. This has been on my mind since Maputo, and we aim to do research so we are in a strong position to negotiate with the government. With regard to HIV and AIDS I learnt so much from the Kenyan union. Here in Ghana we formed a small association of teachers living with HIV and AIDS, we had our first meeting last September. In Maputo, we heard about the experiences of a similar group in Kenya – how it was formed and how they integrated teachers living with HIV and AIDS into the whole structure. It has given us ideas, given us a direction to go from where we are and form a very formidable society where people living with HIV and AIDS can have a say in the implementation and monitoring of the programme. At the end of May there is a meeting of the African Women in Education Network (AWEN) in Benin and I will be bringing there information and ideas from Maputo as well as from our work on EFAIDS here in Ghana.