The Zimbabwe government has partnered with the United Nations and international donors on a program to ensure that every primary school child receives a textbook for all core subjects.
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Thursday that all 5,575 primary schools in Zimbabwe would receive textbooks, thanks to support from the Educational Transition Fund (ETF), a multi-donor funding mechanism launched a year ago to mobilize resources for the education sector with a view to improving the quality of schooling for the country’s children.
The ETF is the first large-scale, external support to the education sector in the past decade and will provide learning resources to every primary school.
The distribution will see a total of 12,000 tons of school supplies, including stationery and 13 million textbooks, distributed in the next three months.
The fund was created to respond to numerous shortages of teaching and learning materials in schools.
Currently, an average of 10 pupils share one textbook while 20 percent of primary schools have no textbooks at all for English, mathematics or local languages.
The UNICEF representative in Zimbabwe Peter Salama said the next phase of the ETF would focus on providing teacher guides and textbooks for marginalized indigenous languages approved by the education ministry as well as braille texts for blind students.
Zimbabwe overtook Tunisia this year as the country with the highest literacy rate in Africa despite the numerous problems that continue to dog the country’s once enviable education sector, according to the UN Development Programme statistical digest published in July.
The southern African country has a 92 percent literacy rate, up from 85 percent.
Source African Press Agency
African News from NetNewsPublisher.com
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