MOZAMBIQUE: New measures needed to tackle education crisis

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

MAPUTO, 13 Feb 2006 (IRIN) - Despite years of interventions designed to turn around Mozambique's historically poor education system, the 2006 school year has kicked off to a dismal start, sparking debate about proposed plans to solve the countries chronic teacher shortages.

According to Naima Saś, Deputy Director of Teacher Training at the Ministry of Education, teacher-pupil ratios were a major cause for concern: "on average, there are 50 pupils in each class, and some teachers even have as many as 70 pupils in a class".

Strapped for resources but determined to increase the number of qualified teachers, the government plans to reduce teacher training from two years to one. "The initiative is a way of training more teachers in a shorter space of time," Saś told IRIN.

The '10 plus 1' plan, meaning that a pupil who has completed the 10th grade can attend a teacher-training college for only one year and obtain a qualification, is to start in 2007.

Debate about the plan reflects concern that it could lower already poor standards of education, and the shocking reality that 44 percent of primary school teachers have had no training at all.

After a recent visit to the northern province of Nampula, where authorities said they were short of 600 educators, Saś noted that the picture was "more or less the same throughout the entire country, with severe shortages of teachers in both urban and rural areas".

According to her, the shortage of teachers has been severely aggravated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. With the prevalence rate now up to 16.2 percent of people aged 15-49, official projections suggest that around 10,000 teachers could be lost to HIV/AIDS by 2010.

Official statistics also indicate that only 24 percent of all girls finish the fifth grade, compared to 40 percent of boys, and a mere 10 percent of girls make it through the seventh grade, while 18 percent of boys complete it. One of the suggested reasons for this imbalance is that girls in rural areas lack professional female role models: only 20 percent of all teachers and nine percent of all civil servants in the education department are women.

"We will be encouraging female students to apply [for the 10 plus 1 plan], because there is a particular shortage of them and they could encourage parents to keep their daughters in school once they reach puberty," Saś commented.

Teachers will also be motivated to accept posts in schools in rural areas. "It will be especially important to build homes in the countryside for the teachers who are coming from outside," she added.

Mozambique's education system was neglected during Portuguese colonial rule, with over 90 percent of the population unable to read or write at independence in 1975. Although the ruling FRELIMO government made efforts after independence to expand free education for all, 16 years of civil war took its toll on the education system.

With donor support, the government has made efforts to rebuild the school system and provide free education during the past 14 years of peace, but "there is still so much to be done, difficult policy decisions have to be made, and there are no quick solutions," Paul Wafer, a Human Development Adviser with the UK Department for International Development (DFID), told IRIN.

The challenge now was to make sure the education sector was developed nationally, not only in particular areas. "Donors need to get out of implementation," Wafer noted, suggesting that donors did not pay enough attention to the sustainability of projects they supported. "Too often we see pilot projects supported by donors that are impossible to scale up across the country," he commented.

He argued that "donors should provide more flexible funds through the existing common fund [pooled donor financing for education]. The ministry [of education] knows what needs to be done and can set their own priorities, and then allocate the funds in a more efficient way".

Commending a recent World Bank-supported project that allowed for direct grants to schools, Wafer said the grants were small "but they made a difference, and the initiative benefited thousands of schools, not just a handful. Moreover, the ministry of education has decided to continue this project because it is sustainable. The financing now comes out of the common funds, which this year are around $40 million US dollars."

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