Third World countries face major shortages of trained and qualified teachers, particularly for primary schools. In this article, Gary Coldevin (a Professor in the Graduate Programme in Educational Technology at Concordia University, Montreal) and Som Naidu (a distance education course developer at the University of the South Pacific, currently taking a PhD at Concordia) outline some strategies which have been employed to remedy such teacher shortages. They place particular emphasis on the provision of in‐service education by distance methods, and describe the systems used in Kenya and at the Universities of the South Pacific and the West Indies as illustrations of current models of distance education practice.