Africa-Press – Mozambique. Mozambique’s Minister of Education Samaria Tovela said on Thursday that around 10,000 classes take place outdoors in the country, pointing to limited funds in the education sector as the reason.
”What we are doing at this stage is looking at existing resources and prioritising areas where the situation is serious,” said Samaria Tovela, Minister of Education and Culture, during the launch of the 12fth edition of the National Culture Festival in Maputo.
According to the minister, the funding deficit for the education sector is among the factors that will require additional classrooms for the 10,000 classes.
“We need resources to be able to build schools and quickly get our children into classrooms,” said Samaria Tovela, adding that efforts are being made to improve the situation of the classes.
“Until we get [the classrooms], we will work to provide (…) blackboards so that our children have decent blackboards, we will see what resources are available,” said the Mozambican minister.
According to Tovela, the provinces most affected by the problem are Nampula and Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique, Zambézia in the centre and Maputo province in the south of the country.
In the province of Nampula alone, in northern Mozambique, more than 1.3 million primary and secondary school pupils attend classes sitting on the ground because desks are currently unavailable, said a source in the education sector on 2 July.
According to Faruk Karim, the head of the Planning Department of the Provincial Directorate of Education in Nampula, a total of 1,329,809 pupils attend classes sitting on the ground, comprising 1,029,810 in primary schools and 299,999 in secondary schools.
The then Minister of Education, Carmelita Namashulua, released data in 2023 showing that at least 118,556 children in Mozambique have transitioned from studying on the ground to using school desks since 2022, benefiting from the distribution of 29,639 school desks out of a total of 60,700 planned for that year.
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