Outputs
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Research in progress.
Project last updated on: 20 Sep 2019.
Motivating public service workers is a primary concern of government institutions as they pursue approaches to improve state effectiveness. From a staffing perspective, several state-funded public service workers are public school teachers. This is the case in Uganda, which has very high rates of teacher absenteeism, even though its teachers seem to be more competent than other teachers in East Africa.
The most common approach to motivate public service workers is to increase their pay. In Uganda, the Ministry of Education and Sports (MOES) has recently increased the pay of primary school teachers by approximately 50% over the last 4 years. While this policy has enabled the teacher union and MOES to advance conversations on methods of improving the quality of learning, the question of motivation has remained. Indeed, existing academic literature points to the fact that it is not uniformly the case that material incentives (including pay for performance) increase teacher effort and student learning.
The MOES has thus shown interest in learning about alternative (non-monetary) methods of improving public service delivery by, one, understanding how recruitment strategies can attract highly motivated skilled workers, and, two, how training methods can tap intrinsic sources of motivation. This study addresses these topics with the following approaches:
Together with the MOES, the researchers aim to engage in a process of knowledge co-generation to better understand how teacher training can combine with recruitment strategies to enhance teacher motivation.
Project last updated on: 20 Sep 2019.