The Sunday News
Sukulwenkosi Dube
FOURTEEN schools and 11 clinics are under construction in Bulilima District in a bid to reduce distances walked by villagers to health and education institutions.
The district has 15 operational clinics out of 22 wards. It also has 18 secondary schools and 62 primary schools.
The chief executive officer for Bulilima Rural District Council, Mr John Brown Ncube, said the clinic and school projects were community initiated.
“We have 14 schools that are under construction and most of these are secondary schools. In addition we also have 11 clinics and one will be opening next month. Our target for the schools is to have two opened by January next year.
“These projects are at various stages but they are community initiated. The villagers came up with their proposals and they started mobilising resources. As a local authority we also assisted with funds and also sourced sponsorship,” said Mr Ncube.
He said villagers in resettlement areas were faced with the greatest challenge as their children were walking long distances to schools because of their settlement patterns.
He said the policy by Ministry of Lands did not allow as many schools as desired to be constructed due to the limited number of homesteads.
Mr Ncube said their homesteads were located far apart while a location for each school had to be determined by a certain number of households.
“The condition of schools in resettlement areas is alarming. Children learn in small numbers and they have their lessons in improperly constructed huts of dagga while others learn in the open air.
“These areas have few people and it becomes difficult for them to raise enough money to construct proper classroom blocks. At the same time these children walk up to 20 kilometres to reach schools because they cannot have as many schools as desired,” he said.
Mr Ncube said while the education policy stated that primary pupils had to walk a maximum of 5km while secondary pupils had to travel up to 10 kilometres to reach schools, this was impossible to achieve within resettlement areas.
Matabeleland South provincial education director Ms Tumisang Thabela recently urged rural communities to build more schools saying the province still had a huge backlog of both secondary and primary schools.
She said about 60 communities within the province urgently needed schools and appealed to local authorities to support the construction of schools through allocating funds.
Deputy provincial education director for secondary and non-formal education Mr Rueben Mabhena recently said the province needed at least 400 more secondary schools to ensure that pupils walked reasonable distances to learning institutions.
He said there were over 500 primary schools and only 150 secondary schools.
He said the province had over 200 000 pupils and secondary schools accounted for almost a third of this figure.
He said this huge disparity was because a number of pupils were failing to progress to secondary school after completing their primary education because of long distances.
About 11 000 pupils from four districts in the country recently received bicycles under the World Vision-led Bicycle Education Empowerment Programme (BEP) in a bid to address the challenge of walking long distances.
