Half the World's Youth, Too Few Teachers: A 15-University Project Builds ESD Teacher Leadership Across Sub-Saharan Africa
"Predictions say that by 2050, half of the world's youth will live in Africa, making education a key driver of sustainable development," says Prof. Dr. Daniel Fischer. At the same time, the Sub-Saharan Africa region is facing a shortage of teachers — in both numbers and in the quality of their training — and the complexity of sustainability challenges adds another layer to what teachers need to be prepared for. SSATL-ESD — Sub-Saharan Africa Teacher Leadership for Education for Sustainable Development is a new transnational initiative to address that gap by strengthening the leadership role of teachers in education for sustainable development (ESD) across the region.
Building on more than 30 years of ESD and teacher-education research led by African and European partners, SSATL-ESD brings together 15 institutions from Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe — universities in South Africa, Zambia, Namibia, Malawi, Kenya, Cyprus, Greece, and Leuphana University Lüneburg. The project is co-funded by the European Commission's Erasmus+ programme, with co-funding and in-kind support from regional partners and African universities. At its core sits the model of ESD Change Projects, an action-learning approach that invites participating leaders to tackle the changes their institutions and surroundings need in order to achieve curriculum innovation and transformative learning. The work is also designed to feed into the African Union Framework for Competencies and Standards for the Teaching Profession (2023), with the project contributing insight on how ESD can be integrated into that framework.
At Leuphana, Daniel Fischer leads the project consortium as principal investigator, with Deepika Joon and Claire Grauer as project coordinators. The African regional coordination is led by Distinguished Prof. Dr. Heila Lotz-Sisitka and Dr. Charles Chikunda at Rhodes University, with course design coordinated by Dr. Wilma van Staden. Integration into the African Union framework is being led by Dr. Zintle Songqwaru-Kamangu (Rhodes University) and UNESCO Chair Prof. Dr. Overson Shumba (Copperbelt University, Zambia), building on a situational analysis led by Dr. Manoah Muchanga (University of Zambia).
The recently concluded Training of Trainers programme — led by Dr. Sirkka Tshininganyamwe (University of Namibia) and Teresa Ruckelshauss (Heidelberg University of Education) — marked an early milestone: a cohort of forty teacher educators across the partner institutions is now prepared to facilitate ESD teacher-leadership courses and to guide peers in implementing ESD Change Projects. The next strand of work, led by Dr. Caleb Mandikonza (University of Witwatersrand) and Dr. Tiffany Banda (University of Malawi), turns to those Change Projects themselves. Distributed leadership is a feature of the project's design as much as it is the model it aims to spread across the region.
Find out more: SSATL-ESD project page
