Author: Deborah Kimathi

Amid global calls for action to address teacher shortages, particularly in Sub Saharan Africa, our work in Tanzania has highlighted the need to go beyond simply building a teacher pipeline. Education systems must also ensure that the pipeline can supply the right types of teachers, in the right places, and in ways that establish and sustain improvements in education outcomes.

Since May 2025, in collaboration with the What Works Hub for Global Education, British Council Tanzania, and RELI Africa, the Learning Generation Initiative has been working with the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (MoEST), the Prime Minister’s Office for Regional Administration and Local Government (PMO-RALG), and the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to understand how Tanzania might better leverage teacher workforce planning to promote equity and quality for all learners.

This work began by mapping the teacher life cycle and identifying potential enablers of stronger reform implementation across each stage of teacher training, recruitment, deployment, and support.  Since then, dialogue with a wide range of education stakeholders has surfaced eight key recommendations, which are captured in this policy brief. These recommendations emphasise the importance of institutional coordination and accountability; aligning teacher supply to demand; strengthening the use of data for planning, forecasting and teacher management; and improving staffing in hard-to-reach areas.  Like other education reforms, their success depends on sustainable financing – an ongoing challenge for decision-makers across the education sector and beyond.

Tanzania already has many of the building blocks needed to improve learning outcomes, including a new foundational learning strategy and a national rollout of teacher continuous professional development (CPD) both of which support ongoing curriculum reforms. However, challenges in teacher workforce planning persist.

Opening remarks from the office of the Permanent Secretary, MoEST at a recent technical dialogue convened by LGI emphasized the importance of the recommendations:

“Teachers remain the most critical component in the delivery of quality education.  The success of our education system depends largely on the availability of well-trained, motivated, and adequately supported teachers.  Effective teacher workforce planning is therefore essential in ensuring that our system has the right number of teachers with the right qualifications, deployed where they are most needed.”

The dialogue underscored the need for: 

  • Coherent coordination mechanisms across institutions. 
  • Alignment of teacher training intake with projected needs, particularly in underserved regions and critical subjects. 
  • Operationalization and integration of data systems that are usable and credible. 
  • Evidence-based planning capacity at both national and subnational levels. 

Data systems underpin many of these priorities, and improved data-driven decision making is a key enabler of all eight recommendations of the policy brief.

To provide the Tanzanian government with insights from other contexts, LGI will draw on experience with data-driven decision making for teacher management in other countries.  For example, in Sierra Leone LGI worked with the Teaching Service Commission to deploy an innovative preference matching algorithm to promote more equitable teacher allocation. The algorithm considers both teacher location preferences and school needs, helping to place teachers where they are most needed and most likely to remain. This supports both retention and equity. The policy brief, Transforming Teacher Deployment: Lessons from a matching algorithm tool, provides research findings from the process.

As a next step in Tanzania, LGI is mapping the data-to-decision pathways relevant to teacher workforce planning, particularly those that influence teacher planning and supply, recruitment and deployment, management and CPD, and retention and attrition.  Working alongside key decision-makers, we hope this process will help identify actionable opportunities and ensure that systems and workforce are adequately supported to address them.

The work to date has surfaced three key areas for further exploration:

  • Enhance Ecosystem Interoperability
    Enable institutional alignment for data-driven decision-making by addressing fragmentation across actors, data sets, and decision pathways – for example, through a joint data-sharing mandate to override legacy silos.
  • Bridge the Fiscal-Technical Gap
    Ensure that technical forecasting models, such as the Teacher Forecasting Framework, are formally linked to budget processes, so that resource allocation can be informed by evidence and technical projections are not routinely overridden by fiscal constraints.
  • Enable the Middle Tier
    Support Local Government Authorities and District Education Officers in transitioning from data collectors to empowered data analysts through targeted capacity building and greater autonomy to address sub-national disparities and inequalities.

These three ideas are currently being explored further through a series of focus group discussions and key informant interviews taking place across all levels of the system.  We are excited to share further insight as the work continues.

Photo credit: A teacher in duty by GPE/Feruzi (Trans.Lieu). Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.