“Well-being, that word is very wide”: Understanding how teachers in Uganda define and navigate their occupational well-being

Abstract

Teachers in Uganda are overstretched and exhausted. Occupational well-being—how teachers feel and function—is associated with satisfaction and retention. Yet, we know little about what teacher well-being looks like in low-resource contexts. We worked with 148 Ugandan teachers to understand how they conceptualize well-being. They described well-being as economic, social, emotional, and physical health. Female teachers were more focused on displaying (over receiving) respect while teachers working with refugee children more frequently described the need for intrinsic motivation and training. We discuss not only the broader implications for understanding TWB in other low-resource and fragile contexts but also how interventions in Uganda need to focus on the interpersonal dynamics that are more proximal to teachers’ lived experiences.