Tanzania gears up for the Sustainability Starts with Teachers programme

Tanzania is prepared to join the Sustainability Starts with Teachers (SST) programme as the eighth country in Southern Africa, starting with a workshop from 27 to 28 April 2021. With funding from SIDA and targeting teacher educators, SST is a collaborative capacity-building programme on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) that runs in 11 countries in southern Africa over four years.

The United Republic of Tanzania embraces the achievement of high quality and sustainable human development for its citizens. This is engraved in the country’s constitution and in its long-term development visions. There is a strong nation-wide partnership and commitment to implementation, monitoring, tracking and reporting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), backed by a strong political will, collective ownership, integrated planning, and supportive legal frameworks. A “whole-of-society” approach has been adopted, and a robust national SDGs coordination and monitoring framework, supported by national statistical offices is being developed.

However, the recent ESD scan, conducted under the SST programme, reveals that teacher education needs to be more adequately aligned with the SDGs, and teachers need to be supported to understand and implement ESD. Furthermore, a general perception of ESD as an addition to what is already a heavy curriculum for teacher education is another challenge. While the idea of ESD is to integrate and incorporate its aspects into already existing courses, for some, there is a feeling of inadequacy of time for experiential learning in a system that is exam-oriented.

The programme therefore, aims to strengthen implementation of ESD in teacher education institutions for teachers and educators from Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), primary, secondary and Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET).

Key discussion topics will include sustainability challenges in the country, ESD and SDGs in curricula, as well as Teacher/TVET education curricula. The workshop is expected to achieve the following:

Initiate, with stakeholders, the implementation of the SST programme in Tanzania and share it’s vision, objectives and expected impact;
Develop a shared understanding of the context for ESD in Tanzania ;
Identify available ESD resources, tools and good practices from previous capacity building efforts in the country, region and beyond;
Initiate “change projects” in TE and TVET institutions;
Discuss the implementation processes of the project and enable the key project-implementing partners to understand their respective roles and commitments.
More than 70 participants from various teacher education and TVET institutions across Tanzania as well as ESD expert and representatives from government departments are expected to attend the workshop.