There is a global crisis in the supply of educated and well prepared primary teachers. The figures are stark. UNICEF estimates that between 10 and 13 million additional teachers will be required if the millennium targets to achieve UBE are to be reached by 2015. In some regions of the world the challenge to expand primary provision is particularly acute. UNICEF, for example, estimates that 44 million children of primary school age are out of school. If they are to be brought within the already strained and burdened education systems, how can teachers be provided? It is clear that major socio-economic structural issues are impacting on teacher quality and teacher supply. The moves towards a knowledge based economy, although uneven, are now impacting on the industrialised and least industrialised parts of the world. Many who might have traditionally become teachers are attracted to other newly emergent occupations. This is particularly true in rural areas where improved communications of all sorts have created a new pattern of employment opportunities. Alongside these deepening structural changes other social processes are at work. Perhaps the most significant for UBE is the impact of the HIV/Aids epidemic on the composition of the primary teaching force. In some countries of sub-Saharan Africa more teachers are lost to Aids each year than are trained through the teacher training system. In this context it is clear that radical solutions are required if the imperative to provide good teachers for the expanding primary system is to be met. And these need to take account of some crucial factors that apply to all developing continents. These include: · the inevitability that millions of new and existing primary teachers will be 'unqualified' and many of them will have had only a rudimentary secondary level education; · the equally inevitable scenario that the bricks and mortar institutions of teacher education created to meet the needs of the twentieth century will be insufficient to meet the needs of the present century: that is not to say such institutions will not have a role. They will, but it is likely to change and, as is already accepted in some policy systems, the emphasis must move to school based rather than college based training solutions. This paper and presentation will explore the way in which new models of supported open learning, integrated with the latest information and communication technologies, can offer radically new solutions to the teacher supply and education crisis. The paper will draw on the author's World Bank experience in scoping national plans in countries such as Lesotho, Rwanda and Nigeria, as well as his direction of OU/RITES* projects in Egypt, South Africa and the USA. The paper and presentation will argue: · that new policy structures need to be put in place to create the conditions where open learning and ICTS can significantly respond to the crisis in teacher supply; · that policy and practice in national and international context must embrace the potential of ICTs in a far more rigorous and vigorous way than is currently the case; · that expertise and knowledge of design and implementation of open learning systems needs significantly enhancing if the potential of the consumable solutions is to be realized.