By Hailemariam Desalegn, Prime Minister of Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, we have reason to be very proud of the progress we have made in education over the past decade. In 1999, just 37% of children were going to primary school. By 2011 this had risen to 87% – one of the fastest increases in the world.

We still have a long way to go, but thanks to this expansion of primary school, the share of our young people who are literate has also increased, from 34% in 2000 to 52% in 2011.

How did we manage all this?

This rapid and equitable expansion of access to free education has been enabled through a sustained government-led effort to reduce poverty and expand the public education system by creating an effective balance between supply-side policies (such as the construction of schools in remote areas) and complementary policies to stimulate demand (e.g. fee abolition and mother tongue instruction).

This has been backed by substantial increases in national education expenditure and aid to the sector, which is doubled between 2000 and 2010, to 25%, as well as improved planning and implementation capacity at all levels.

The shift to greater regional and local autonomy has helped increase community participation and led to more widespread popular recognition of the importance of education for boys and girls, which have also had a key role in expanding access to education across the country in a very short time.

These encouraging figures are from the 2013/4 Education for All Global Monitoring Report: Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all – the world’s most authoritative survey of education progress –whose global launch event I was honoured to host in Addis Ababa last month.

On the international scale, however, the report conveys some sombre findings. Worldwide, 250 million children are not learning to read, write and count, whether they are in school or not, because their education is of such poor quality.

This is costing $129 billion a year – the money spent on poor education that fails to give children the basic skills they need.

It is often claimed that getting more children into school inevitably means lowering the quality of education. But the 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report shows that it is possible to increase access to education while also making sure that children actually learn when they are in school.

The most striking evidence comes from the very region that is often seen as lagging behind – our region, sub-Saharan Africa. Including, of course, Ethiopia.

This balance is particularly impressive given that children attending school for the first time are more likely to be disadvantaged – to have experienced malnutrition and poverty or to live in remote rural areas. In addition, their parents are often illiterate and unable to help them with their studies.

Between 2000 and 2007, Kenya and the United Republic of Tanzania made great strides in the numbers reaching the end of primary school, partly because they abolished primary school fees (the United Republic of Tanzania in 2001 and Kenya in 2003). At the same time, children learned more.

In the United Republic of Tanzania between 2000 and 2007, the proportion of children who completed primary school rose from half to around two-thirds, while the proportion that were both in school and learning the basics in mathematics increased from 19% to 36%.

This is equivalent to around 1.5 million extra children learning the basics.

To benefit fully from education’s incredible power to transform lives, however, all of us in sub-Saharan Africa need to concentrate on the further steps that will improve education quality at the same time as we are getting more children into school.

Above all, that means improving the quality of our teaching, especially for the disadvantaged, as the 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report demonstrates. We need to make sure that measures to recruit, train, deploy and retain teachers are designed to give disadvantaged children the same chances as other children.

New recruits must reflect the diversity of the children they are going to teach, for example. Sometimes that means recruiting more female teachers.

Teachers also need good training that equips them to meet the needs of children from a wide range of backgrounds – including classroom experience, and access to mentors once they start teaching.

Teachers should be allocated to areas serving disadvantaged children, such as remote and rural areas. Incentives such as housing or allowances can help draw good teachers to such areas. Incentives are also needed to retain the best teachers in the profession – including an attractive career path that offers opportunities for promotion.

In the end, an education system is only as good as its teachers – that is why we need to give them every bit of support that we can.

In a little less than two decades, we have managed to enrol more than 22 million children in schools.

In Ethiopia, although we still have a long way to go, we have also made huge progress in a very short time. The movement to get more children into school is unstoppable. Now our big challenge is to give those children the best teaching possible. We know which road to take – so let’s take it together, for the sake of this generation and generations to come.

Ethiopia aims to make a significant contribution to this process in its newly announced role as one of the champion countries for the UN Secretary General’s Global Education First Education Initiative – an honour that recognizes my government’s commitment to the Education for All goals and the Millennium Development Goals. In 2014, we will host a policy forum to address strategies for strengthening teacher training institutions in Africa.