Teacher pay in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and South Asia has been a highly contentious area of education policy since the early 2000s. This has largely arisen in response to the findings of research and other policy analysis that argues that teachers at government schools in many countries are ‘overpaid’ and that, where this is the case, salaries should be adjusted downwards over time. Justin Sandefur, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Development forcefully reiterated this view in a 2018 blog posting. He argues that ‘relative to context, teachers in poor countries are relatively rich’ and that ‘teacher salaries bear little relation to the level of a countries wealth’. The main reason for this is that ‘public school teachers in many developing countries earn civil service salaries that are far higher than market wages’. He specifically cites his own research (conducted with other colleagues) in Kenya where teacher ‘wage premia’ are exceptionally high.

Read more in my working paper number 15