Sixty-five Eritrea female teachers across Southern Region received certificates and monetary awards this week for work ranging from lesson planning to community outreach, in a ceremony attended by Education Minister Dr Halima Mohammed and the region’s governor. The recognition, drawn from all 12 of the region’s sub-zones, is a small but telling data point in a continent-wide story: women make up roughly 55 percent of the Southern Region’s 3,943 teachers, a figure that sits notably above the sub-Saharan African average.
That comparison matters more than it might first appear. Across sub-Saharan Africa, women remain a minority of the primary teaching workforce — just 47 percent as of 2022, according to UNESCO, the only region in the world where that is true. At secondary level the gap widens sharply, and Eritrea itself has historically been among the countries where women make up fewer than 30 percent of secondary school teachers, a group that also includes Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso and South Sudan. Eritrea’s Southern Region figure, spanning pre-school through high school, suggests either meaningful regional variation within the country or genuine progress since those earlier continental estimates — either way, a data point worth watching as more recent figures emerge.
The stakes behind that gender balance go beyond representation for its own sake. Education researchers have consistently found that female teachers can influence whether girls stay in school and how far they progress, acting as visible proof that education leads somewhere for young women in communities where that is not always assumed. Eritrea’s Education Minister struck a similarly cautious note at the ceremony, telling attendees that while women’s participation and capacity in education are encouraging, greater effort is still needed to translate that into better outcomes — a reminder that representation in the teaching workforce is a starting point, not an endpoint, for closing Africa’s gender gaps in education.
Those gaps remain wide by any continental measure. UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report has found that no country in sub-Saharan Africa has yet achieved gender parity in both primary and secondary education, and the region continues to have the world’s highest rate of primary-age children out of school, with girls disproportionately represented. Teacher supply itself is a constraint layered on top of that: the African Union estimates the continent needs millions of additional teachers to meet its 2030 education targets, a shortage acute enough that recruiting, training and retaining teachers — regardless of gender — has become a central plank of continental policy.
That policy shift is already under way. The African Union’s Continental Education Strategy for Africa 2026–2035, launched alongside a wider Decade of Education at the African Union Commission’s headquarters in Addis Ababa last October, names teacher professionalism as one of its core pillars and treats gender, equity and inclusion as a dedicated strategic area rather than an afterthought. For African governments and education ministries, Eritrea’s regional recognition programme is a small-scale version of exactly the kind of teacher-focused, gender-attentive policy the continental strategy is trying to encourage at national level — rewarding classroom performance directly, rather than through credentials or seniority alone.
Whether that translates into durable change depends heavily on what happens after the certificates are handed out. Recognition programmes are relatively low-cost interventions, and their real test lies in whether they are sustained, expanded to cover male teachers as the Minister requested, and paired with the harder work of improving pay, training and working conditions that keep both women and men in the profession long-term. Eritrea’s education office in the Southern Region has signalled it intends the award-winning teachers to serve as role models for colleagues across the sub-zones — a modest but concrete step that other African education systems, wrestling with similar gender imbalances and teacher shortages, will be watching as part of a much larger continental effort to get more capable teachers, and specifically more women, in front of African classrooms.
