They're both very good points. We estimate that the total shortage of teachers for sub-Saharan Africa in relation to those goals is around 1.2 million.
Of course as a government, hiring a teacher is not a one-off annual commitment. It's a central part of the recurrent budget. But that's also why governments need to make the long-term revenue-raising commitments to finance those investments and why donors themselves have to do far more as well. Because for a country to recruit teachers and put them in place, they have to have security over the flow of future aid resources.
One of the concerns that we draw attention to is that aid flows from some countries tend to be highly volatile and unpredictable, making it difficult for governments to plan. So there's a financing gap part of the story that has to be addressed. Of course governments need to ensure—as I think you've tried to do in Canada—that good teachers are linked up with underperforming schools and disadvantaged regions. We cite in the report a number of examples of countries that have tried to do that with varying degrees of success.
The rural-urban gap that you described is one of the great fault lines in education in developing countries, whether you look at adult literacy, attendance in school, enrolment rates, and so on. But cutting across that rural-urban gap is a gender divide. It tends to be poor, rural girls in particular who are the most disadvantaged and being left furthest behind.
Now there are very concrete proven interventions that can deliver results in this area. Fifteen years ago Bangladesh had one of the biggest gender gaps in the world. It now has no gender gap. Why has the gender gap disappeared? Partly because the government has put in place a stipend program, an incentive program for parents to put young daughters in school. In other words, there's a financial benefit for parents to do that.
Senegal has been trying to do something similar. We've seen a dramatic drop in out-of-school girl numbers in Ethiopia. That's happened because the government has invested very heavily—with Canadian support, actually—in building classrooms in the most disadvantaged rural areas, which has reduced the distance between communities and schools. Distance between communities and schools is a big factor for girls in particular.
I think in all of these areas there are proven results. Canadian aid is already supporting improvements in these areas. Maybe there's something to be said for looking at what has worked well and scaling that up and duplicating it in other aid programs.