Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Minister Amon Murwira has challenged college graduates to be innovative and start to establish their own schools as the country is short of between 3 000 and 4 000 schools.
Murwira made the remarks while speaking during a graduation ceremony at the United College of Education (UCE). He said:
What we lacked was the framework under which our graduates can start schools and be facilitated to do so.
It’s normally a matter of policy direction and resources being poured towards that policy direction.
That’s where the discussion is, not whether we have enough jobs or not. We don’t have enough schools; we don’t have enough teachers and we don’t have enough people with the expertise that you have.
I told you about the deficit of schools. So why are we stuck? Why are we not building schools?
Who said we cannot build schools? Who said we should work for the Public Service Commission?
Section 75, Sub-section 2 of the constitution says you can be the founder of your own schools.
Anybody can start their own school but when you look at most of the private schools, except for the Mother Touch group of schools which was started by a student from Seke Teachers’ College, they belong to people that are not even trained in teaching.
We have to start forming groups of our students to start their own schools and we fund them so they start those institutions.
Why was it not possible? It was not possible because we did not have Education 5.0. Now we have changed the law so that it is now possible to do so.
We changed the National Planning and Development Act so that it can fund school start-ups.
We are starting to operationalise that we have said to every college that at the end, they must spend some time with a graduating class forming these consortiums so we can have, for example, the UCE group of schools or whatever other name you might want to call them. Let’s start with one or two examples next year.
During the graduation ceremony at the United College of Education, 707 graduands received diplomas. 618 were female while 89 were male.
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