The Sunday News
Zimbabwe has made giant strides in many social sectors with the health sector’s fight against HIV and Aids and other diseases quite notable while in education the country continues to shine on the continent.
Despite such successes, it is always wise not to rest on our laurels but to continually endeavour to achieve much more.
Reports in our sister paper, Chronicle yesterday say the country has a deficit of 2 050 schools that should have been built already to relieve pressure on existing ones but are yet to be constructed due to a lack of funds. This means that many pupils are failing to access quality education due to a shortage of schools while some are forced to drop out of school due to the inconvenience of walking long distances daily.
What is heartening, however, are pledges by the Government that plans were afoot to build more schools to address this anomaly. We learn that the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education will this week start issuing tenders to companies for them to assist in the construction of schools to address the huge deficit in educational institutions. The greatest need, the Permanent Secretary in the ministry, Dr Sylvia Utete-Masango said, was in high-density suburbs, rural and resettlement areas.
“We have come up with a strategy to address the challenge of infrastructural development within schools. This initiative has recently been approved by Cabinet. We are departing from the traditional method of building schools because of the backlog that we have in schools.
“As a ministry, we will be starting joint ventures with companies from the country and outside. We’ll be offering these companies tenders to build schools in the country using their own funds,” she said.
While we await the full details of how the programme would unfold, public-private partnerships have yielded positive returns in the past hence our hope that this one too, would not be an exception. It has to be noted that apart from pressure brought about by population growth, the land reform programme saw at least 300 000 families being allocated land in areas that did not have schools. The state of the schools at some of these resettlement areas should be addressed without further delay to close the yawning gap in educational standards between normal urban schools and makeshift structures at newly resettled areas.
Children in these areas have a right to quality education too and the earlier the Government moves in via the infrastructure development cluster of Zim Asset the better for the pupils. It should also be pointed out that quality of education is not measured by the quality of the physical structures from which lessons are conducted but that it should be a total package of such structures, a relevant curriculum, ample learning material and motivated and adequately qualified teaching staff to impart knowledge to the pupils whose parents would also be supportive of their offspring.
As part of ensuring a holistic approach to solving education challenges, the Government had reportedly put 1 600 teachers under a staff development programme, though the initial target was 2 500 teachers under the first phase.
We have carried stories recently in this publication about a shortage of Maths and Science teachers in Matabeleland in particular and the whole country in general.
Under the teacher capacity development programme, Dr Utete-Masango said areas where teachers needed training to better assist pupils were Mathematics, Sciences, vocational and technical subjects, management and finance, ICTs and heritage and cultural studies and teaching in local languages.
It is our hope that we shall see many schools taking up vocational and technical subjects seriously in line with reviews to the educational curriculum while concerted efforts are also required to halt the poor performance by pupils in local languages that seems to suggest an alienation from their identity as focus has tended to be on English at the expense of other languages.
It is only when the educational challenges in all their facets are addressed that we can confidently claim our place among the best on the continent and the world. The new programmes must bear fruit to ensure equity in education provision in the country while providing the private sector that relies so much on an educated population an opportunity to contribute to the nurturing of that pool from which they fish.
