Cumulative Risk, Teacher Well-Being and Instructional Quality: Evidence from the DRC and Ghana

There is growing concern that teachers in low-income countries are increasingly demotivated, which may partially explain deteriorating teaching performance and student learning outcomes, high rates of turnover and absenteeism, and misconduct. At the same time, remarkably little systematic research has examined the living and working conditions for teachers in sub-Saharan Africa and how such conditions predict teacher well-being and performance. Teachers in low-income countries (LICs) are often ill equipped for the challenges of teaching and face many hardships in their work and personal lives that threaten their well-being and effectiveness in the classroom. The present study uses a cumulative risk framework to examine the multiple challenges teachers experience and selected indices of their well-being and teaching quality. The study uses two samples to answer these questions. The first is a representative sample of primary school teachers from the southeastern province of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the second is a representative sample of Kindergarten teachers from the Greater Accra Region in Ghana. Analyses examine the various risks teachers face in their lives in and out of work, as well as how these risks accumulate and predict professional well-being and teaching quality. Specifically, this study addresses the following research questions: (1) Is cumulative risk associated with lower teacher motivation and higher burnout and job dissatisfaction in a representative sample of primary school teachers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Ghana?; (2) Is cumulative risk associated with lower teaching quality in Ghana?; and (3) Are particular domains of cumulative risk more or less predictive of teachers' motivation, burnout, job dissatisfaction, and teaching quality? Are work-related risks more predictive than risks in the domains of teachers' personal lives? The results indicate that the cumulative hardships teachers face in their work and personal lives contribute to the poor motivation and burnout found in other studies. It is critical that conditions for teachers, both professionally and personally, are targeted for improvement in order to enhance teachers' capabilities and effectiveness in the classroom. Two tables are appended.