Teaching is generally not regarded as an attractive career option in Rwanda. A young person will enter the teaching profession when most other options are no longer available. Many aspire to be doctors, lawyers, or entrepreneurs, but when they fail to do well enough in their secondary school leaving examinations, they choose education as a last resort.

Teachers at the lowest end of the pay scale receive a net monthly salary of 30,000 Rwandan francs (approximately $54 Canadian). This sum is nowhere close to a living wage. To make matters more difficult, districts are sometimes two to three months late in paying their teachers this meager amount.

While public education is "free" in Rwanda, there is always an expectation that parents will pay teacher incentives to the school each term. These incentives are used to supplement the teacher's salary. While these incentives are small and may not seem like a great deal of money, many parents either are unable to pay or chose not to pay for a variety of reasons. When parents do not pay these incentives, Head Teachers then use much of their valuable time tracking down the money. This produces many conflicts between administration and parents and sometimes trickles down to the classroom to create tension between teachers and students.

Students at Nduba Primary outside with their teacher

After all, these incentives make up a portion of the teacher's livelihood and might make the difference between needing to have second and third jobs in order to support their own families. It also may be the difference between staying in the profession and walking away completely to find a better-paying job.

When Wellspring's parenting trainers recently met with parent groups at the schools with which we work, the topic of these incentives frequently came up in conversation. Parents didn't understand why they had to pay it, and Head Teachers didn't understand why they weren't paying it.

"Teaching at its core is a moral profession. Scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose." (Michael Fullan, Why Teachers Must Become Change Agents, 1993)

When I send my children to school, whether in Canada or here in Kigali, I want to know that their teachers have chosen the profession because they love children, they want children to learn, they believe children can learn, and they know that a solid education is the key to a better life and a better world. If I scratched the surface of the teacher, I would want to see that this higher purpose was much more of a motivator than money, the adulation of the community, a handout from an NGO, or any other incentive.

While it is on a different sphere, we desire the same hearts from the teachers in our program. In one of the early assignments for teachers in our Quality Education in-service program, we ask teachers to "explain how you think you can impact the next generation and make a difference in the way the nation will develop." The teacher responses, both at the beginning and end of the program, are at the core of our work here. Ultimately, we hope that seeking a higher purpose leads teachers on a journey to a relationship with Jesus Christ, but we also hope to challenge the core of why they became a teacher in the first place. If they don't have a moral purpose when they start the program, we sure hope they have one by the end.

If you were a teacher and your salary was cut in half tomorrow, would you still choose to be a teacher? What if your salary was slashed to the point where you could still feed, clothe, and provide shelter for your family, but you could afford nothing more? For many of us, our moral purpose would suddenly be somewhat adjusted. In any profession, we would likely begin to question why we do what we do.

An incentive is given to someone to encourage a certain behavior. We believe sustainable development work has a lot to do with developing people, and developing people has a lot to do with working at a deeper level than the surface alone. We are not out to dispose of an employee incentive program, but we do hope our teachers will seek after different kinds of incentives.