Inside Venson- Moitoi�s project
Bame Piet | Friday May 30, 2014 16:23
Speaking in an interview with Mmegi recently, Majwabe said that the current education system is being mended to feed the market with required skilled manpower.
“It’s a revamping of the current education system from pre-primary to tertiary level including financial management, information management, and human resource management. For the last 10 years education results have been going down, despite huge financial investment. The more money we put into education, the less the results for the last 10 years,” Majwabe said.
He added that the ministry has found that a number of problems, one being that 82 percent of pupils who go to primary school, have not undergone pre-primary education.
The coordinator said that research has shown that pupils who go through pre-primary spend less time covering the primary curriculum.
He said: “We are also training up to Diploma level pre-school teachers. By 2018 we should have introduced two-year pre-primary education at all public schools and we are going to enhance teaching of science and maths, which are a basis for technical development.”
He added that tertiary level enhances education in terms of research and innovation.
“We are going to revamp our brigades, and vocational training institutions so that they offer attractive programmes training up to PHD level. We are actually branding vocational education. The major issue is to export skills, and transform Botswana from a diamond resource based country to a skill-based country, so that we can export skills,” he said.
Majwabe said that education should be globally competitive and students will have specialised skills so that they can be self-employed. He said that the project will bring to an end a trend where foreign companies are awarded huge tenders in Botswana bringing their own labour because of shortage of skill.
“There are more jobs without people, and there are people without jobs. This means that there are employment opportunities for which Batswana do not possess the right skills. Most of these are in areas such as vocational education, hair dressing, building and construction among others,” Majwabe said.
The programme will also establish mechanisms for specialisation of areas such as indigenous knowledge and skills not covered in the formal school curriculum, he said.
“We want to empower everyone, including a fisherman in the Okavango, the Bazezuru whom we will train and award certificates which they can use to look for jobs anywhere in the world,” said Majwabe. The project has brought to four the total number of ministers at the Ministry of Education and Skills Development and is co-sponsored by government and the European Union.