Mozambique: Government to finance schoolbook production – Watch

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Mozambique: Government to finance schoolbook production – Watch

7:00 CAT | 06 Feb 2023

Photo: Presidência da Republica de Moçambique

Mozambican President, Filipe Nyusi has announced that the government will gradually finance the production of school textbooks to boost access to education throughout the country, especially in remote areas, where the books often arrive late due to the degradation of access roads.

Clearly the government hopes to exercise control over the content of textbooks to avoid any repetition of last year’s scandal when books printed in Portugal were found to contain gross geographical end even mathematical errors.

“We have the intention to produce the book internally. The hardest thing is to design and edit, but we will gradually produce the book. Now we are dependent on the partners of the State Budget”, Nyusi said on Tuesday, during the lunch of the 2023 academic year 2023 and the inauguration of a secondary school in Molumbo district, in the central province of Zambézia.

The inaugurated school is budgeted at 71 million meticais (1.1 million dollars at the current exchange rate), disbursed by the Islamic Development Bank.

For the 2023 school year, “we will make available a total of 19,623,220 primary school text books, of which 18,550,600 books will be monolingual (i.e. in the official language, Portuguese), and 1,072,620 bilingual books (in Portuguese and a Mozambican language).”

According to Nyusi, 2022 was a crucial year for the education sector, marked by the approval of the Teacher Training Policy and Implementation Strategy for 2023-2032.

“Under the Government’s Five-Year Programme (2020-2024) a total of 3,857 schools will come into operation, of these 3,817 are public and 40 are private. Thia is a growth of the school network of 1.3 percent compared with the number of schools that operated in 2022”, he said.

According to Nyusi, terrorist acts over the past three years, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, have caused the displacement of more than 52,000 pupils and affected 1,024 teachers, 13 of whom were barbarously murdered.

“Between October 2021 and March 2022, the tropical cyclones Guambe and Ana affected 1,871 schools and, consequently, 4,615 classrooms were destroyed, affecting 5,537 students, particularly in the central and northern provinces”, the president said.

The president also revealed that schools in Zambézia expect to enroll 2,380,631 students, of which 2,368,436 will be in public education and 12,195 in private education. These numbers represent a growth of 14.6 percent in comparison with last year.

In 2022, said Nyusi, “we developed Mozambique’s first sign language teaching program in 7th grade. This exercise will be accompanied by a capacity building program for teachers who assist students with special educational needs”.

“We have expanded the school network, from 13,034 primary schools and 618 secondary schools in 2020 to 13,180 primary schools and 648 secondary schools in 2022”, added the President.

Also in 2022, 719,194 girls attended secondary school, a figure corresponding to 48.9 percent of a universe of 1,468,904 students.