Recruitment and Retention of Public Sector Teachers in Ghana: A Discrete Choice Experiment

Abstract

The shortage of public sector teachers in rural areas is one of the main challenges facing policy makers in the education sector, in both developing and developed countries. This study sought to analyze the preferences of teachers, and how they would respond to alternative incentives associated with working in a rural location. Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) which is rooted in Random Utility Theory (RUT) was used to capture the responses of 120 teacher trainees in Berekum College of Education. However, the full and the subgroup models were generated using the binary probit in STATA (Version 11.0). Marginal effect was also estimated. The magnitude of estimates from both the probit model and the marginal effects indicate that, for rural area posting, teachers in the public sector generally prefer and place higher priority on incentive packages such as granting of study leave with pay, provision of housing and promotion after three years of work. This was generally supported by the subgroup analysis. Also, the levels of salary will be traded off for non-financial incentive packages. It is recommended that in order to desist from force recruitment and the problem of mitigating geographical imbalances of public sector teachers, policy makers in the education sector should adopt a strategy by granting of study leave with pay, provision of housing and promotion after three years of teaching in rural areas