November 28, 2016, 14:00-16:00 IDEC Large Conference Room, number of participants 23

This seminar was held as a part of the JICA’s Knowledge Co-Creation Program “INSET management in Africa (Anglophone countries)”. JICA participants were from Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Malawi, Ghana and Tanzania, who serve as directors at the regional, municipal, and district level, and headteachers.

Mr. Atsushi Matachi, Senior Advisor (Basic Education), JICA, made presentation titled as “Achievement and Challenges of JICA-supported Projects in Africa”. In his presentation, the followings are identified as findings from experiences of JICA-supported technical cooperation; 1) Cascade-type INSET needs to be complemented with school-based INSET such as Lesson Study; 2) For teachers to use a learner-centered approach, consistency of the three levels of curriculum is critical; 3)Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) is needed by teachers to conduct effective lessons; 4)Collaboration between PRESET and INSET is important to propagate Learner-centered approach; 5)Foundation skills such as numeracy skills are the foundation for further study of mathematics.

We have very active interactions from the floor. For example, “In the past, teachers behaved well and self-motivated but nowadays it is not like that”, “It is due to low salary for teachers, thus teacher’s motivation is diminishing”, “Without supervision, people can’t perform as expected and it has roots on our culture in Africa”, “Most education reforms comes from top to down to schools without getting full understanding of teachers why they have to do this”, “Additional work created by these reforms make teachers much busier and let them seek financial motivation to do additional things”, “These policies are sometimes driven by development partners”, “Teachers’ self-motivation is a critical factor”.

This event became possible as IDEC are involved in both the short-term course like JICA’s “Knowledge Co-Creation Program” and long-term students who study at IDEC. For IDEC to be a practical platform to discuss issues and solutions for development, I wish to continue events like this in the future.

(Kazuro Shibuya, Development of Educational Development and Cultural and Regional Studies)