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In South Africa, an incident at a school in Soweto revived the debate over false teacher qualifications. This week, a former primary school teacher stabbed a director who had suspended him. The teacher was dismissed after the school discovered, following a complaint from parents, that he had lied about his qualifications and had no diploma. According to the South African Council of Educators, dozens or even hundreds of teachers lie about their qualifications.

A human resources assistant in the Education ministry is in the courts after she fraudulently recruited 31 unqualified teachers. The accused is charged with 'Criminal abuse of office'. According to prosecutors, between October last year and February this year she connived with eight accomplices who have already appeared in court and hatched a plan to misrepresent to their employer and converted contracts to ‘indefinite conditions of service’ for teachers who would otherwise not have filled the required conditions.

The issue of education continues to be at the centre of public discourse in Liberia, with frequent outcries about the system. While dozens of scholarly papers have been published by veteran scholars about how to reform education in the country, ambiguity remains as to who is at the origin of the poor level of quality within a sector plagued with issues such as sex for grades, bribery, deception, outdated curricula and a lack of competent instructors.

The Ministry of Education (MoE) has commenced the teacher verification process to ensure the restructuring and rightsizing of the teaching workforce. The purpose of this initiative is to audit the teachers' payroll and correct all identified anomalies to ensure the elimination of persons with fraudulent qualifications from the system. Money saved by the MOE, if any, will be used to rationalize the pay and benefits of educators to attract and retain professionals in the field.

About 3,000 schoolteachers in Bihar, who allegedly used fake degree certificates to get jobs, have resigned till date apprehending legal action. Earlier, the state government admitted that it recruited more than 300,000 contract teachers without verifying their educational and professional degrees. The petitioner of the probe said he has collected documents as evidence through Right to Information queries to prove that thousands of teachers used forged degrees to get jobs.

A ruling by India's Supreme Court that appointments for highly specialised teaching positions in medical colleges cannot be subject to affirmative action caste-based quotas has led to a political uproar that has disrupted the current session of parliament, where a number of higher education bills are pending. The issue of caste reservations is highly political, with elections due in five states and national elections scheduled for 2013.

In an attempt to curb unregistered teachers, The Chief Executive of the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRC) has recently mandated that any teacher in the Imo region caught without the proper qualifications will be fired and prosecuted by the state and that schools not meeting required standards would be closed down.