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In a rural district of Uganda, almost half of all teachers were absent on a typical school day. The African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN) trained a few student leaders in each school to take attendance of everyone, including teachers. As a result, teacher absenteeism has dropped to ten percent in this district.

The Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) recently pointed out that teacher absenteeism was one of the reasons for high failure rates in the Primary Leaving Examinations. However further researches have confirmed that the least paid teacher are not the ones who absent themselves the most. In fact are the high paid teachers the ones that spend the school time in the market places.

New teachers often face a many-month delay before they receive their salaries. Teachers sometimes supplement their income with a second job. This can affect their own attendance at school, and can put pressure on the amount of time they have to prepare their lessons. A 2007 report by the Cambodian NGO Education Partnership (NEP) reveals education costs for each child averaged $108 annually, or 9 percent of each family's annual income. "When you include informal and formal school costs, and private classes and snacks, many students are paying $2.50 every day," the education and capacity-building officer for the NGO Education Partnership (NEP), told IRIN. The inability to pay informal fees was the most common reason parents gave for their children dropping out, the report stated.

Honduras invests large sums in education, but powerful teachers' unions and political appointments hinder reforms in a sector vulnerable to corruption and lacking of civil society monitoring. There are 50,000 teachers in the country; between 2,500 and 6,000 of them have pending issues about their posts (such as irregular paid leaves or unjustified absence while still on the payroll). For current decentralization plans to impact positively on education services, local auditing skills need to be improved, parents must be given a bigger role, and unions must adhere to codes of conduct.

The IIEP/UNESCO report "Corrupt schools, corrupt universities: What can be done" has identified private tuition as a major source of "unethical behavior" in India, observing that it has become a major industry, consuming a considerable amount of parents' money and pupils' time. Together with private tuitions, two other major problems that face the Indian education system are the manipulation of entrance test scores and teachers absenteeism.

According to the education minister, primary school head teachers will be required to sign performance agreements every year. Many pupils had not attained the desirable learning competency in literacy and numeracy partly because of the slackness, absenteeism and lack of commitment from the head teachers. The assessment guidelines and the tracking of the teachers' performance will help to create a more fair and verifiable system.