The Zimbabwe Telegraph
By Getrude Gumede
January 22, 2010
GWERU – The Ministry of Education and Culture working in conjunction with UNICEF and UNESCO which last year launched an Education Transition Fund is working on plans to improve the pupil text book ratio and help restore basic education for all to Zimbabweans, Education and Culture Minister, David Coltart has said.
Coltart, who chairs the fund, said the fund has raised $30 million so far.
The Minister said the Fund has also received a lot of financial support from Scandinavian states who have been very generous towards them.
He said the fund has agreed that the first tranche of the money would be used to purchase 9 million primary school text books for the country’s 5 000 primary schools while secondary text books would be done later, after the completion of the primary schools programme.
“The Fund is managed by UNICEF. Since we established it last year, we have raised $30 million. We have a target of $50 million that we are trying to raise. UNICEF acting on instructions from the fund has issued by tender the printing of 9 million primary school text books. I anticipate that the contracts for the publication of the text books will be issued during February when we will see companies printing the text books,†he said.
Coltart said the Ministry of Education and Culture will start distributing the text books to the 5 000 primary schools in the country during the course of the next six months.
“It’s a mammoth task distributing 9 million text books to 5 000 schools. It is a huge exercise which is unprecedented in the history of the education system of this country. It is an exercise whose objective is meant to restore basic education for all Zimbabweans.
We are targeting co-subjects which are Maths, English, Shona and Ndebele as well as Environmental Science. We have retained a portion of the money so that we purchase braille text books for the visual impaired students,†he said.
On secondary schools text books, Minister Coltart said the Fund was still to come up with the exact number of books to be printed as they were still focused on primary schools.
“It is subject to raising sufficient funds. We need to raise an additional $20 million for the book programme and meet our target of $50 million for the programme to succeed. We will also be focusing on co-subjects text books for secondary schools just like in the primary school programme,†he said.
The Minister said the exercise was aimed at reducing the pupil text book ratio to reasonable levels that made learning easier.
He said at some schools 20 pupils were sharing a single text book while in others as many as 36 or 40 were making do with one text book.
“At the moment we have schools, both primary and secondary, that only have one text book for the teacher only while there are some without even a single text book. It is such schools that we will target first which are in dire need of books. We will address the situation in the worst affected schools and these happen to be mostly rural schools.
Our aim is to have a ratio of 1:1. That is the ideal set up. If we fail to achieve that, we will then settle for three pupils per text book,†said Coltart.
The Minister expressed gratitude to the Scandinavian States, US and the UK for supporting the Education Transition Fund.
“A variety of countries have been very supportive of the Education Transition Fund. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have been very generous towards the fund. Netherlands, Australia, Germany, the US and UK have also helped in the raising of the funds and we hope they maintain that spirit,†he said.
School infrastructure was falling apart while text books and furniture were becoming difficult to replace as economic hardships hit chilling levels in the period between 2000 and 2008.