UNESCO's Teacher Training Initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa (TTISSA) is a new 10-year project to improve the quality and teacher training capacities in 46 sub-Saharan countries. The programme is designed to assist countries to synchronize their policies, teacher education and labour practices with national development priorities for Education for All (EFA) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) through a series of four-year cycles. The acute shortage of qualified teachers has been identified as one of the biggest challenges to EFA; some 4 million more teachers are needed in sub-Saharan Africa to meet the goal of Universal Primary Education (UPE) by 2015. The effectiveness of an HIV and AIDS teacher training programme can be measured at two levels, namely; the change in attitude and behaviour of teacher training graduates and secondly, the change in attitude and behaviour of the students they teach. There is a strong case in favour of starting early in teaching about HIV and AIDS, yet attitudes and behaviour seem to be more dramatic in teenage years when youth start to be sexually active before onset of adulthood. There is merit in teaching HIV and AIDS in order to prevent youth from acquiring the pandemic through their sexual behaviour and other methods such as sharing syringes, hence the importance of relevant secondary school programmes. This report partly focuses on teachers, both in their capacity as agents of HIV/AIDS education as well as a section of the population that has been shown to be vulnerable to the epidemic. The report is a web-based desk study providing background information on HIV/AIDS and the teaching profession in 10 African countries and should be viewed as a working document in order to facilitate the development of effective mechanisms and more useful tools for dealing with the pandemic. The countries described are selected from a list of 17 first wave target countries identified for the TTISSA: Angola, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia. It is planned that this report be followed by an in-depth study of three countries, namely Angola, Central African Republic and Zambia to further analyse the complexity, the constrains and the level of efficiency of HIV/AIDS programmes for teachers.