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Zimbabwe: Deteriorating education system and political tensions have led to severe teacher shortage

Incentives that parents can pay to improve teachers’ salaries have become one of the most controversial issues facing the education unions of Zimbabwe. It is dividing teachers and has incapacitated access to education by the most vulnerable groups of our society, said ZIMTA President Tendai Chikowore in her opening address.

ZIMTA estimates that in the past decade more than 20,000 teachers have left the country. In 2009, according to Chikowore, 35% of the teacher posts in primary education and 33% in secondary education were vacant.She noted that “teachers' morale sank to its lowest ebb since independence” and that any form of support for the reconstruction of Zimbabwe should recognize the need for support to teachers.

BULILIMA, Zimbabwe, 7 December 2011 – After completing the fourth grade at the top of her class, 13-year-old Ellen Mbedzi was forced to drop out of Mafeha Primary School in Bulilima, a district in south-western Zimbabwe. Her unemployed father did not see the value of spending the family’s limited resources on a girl.

Ellen became a recipient of the Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) programme, a school grant programme that helps disadvantaged children stay in school, or, in Ellen’s case, return to the classroom. Her school also received support from the Education Transition Fund (ETF), which provided textbooks in four core subjects – math, English, environmental sciences and a local language – to every student in the school.

ETF, an innovative partnership of the government, UNICEF and the international donor community, offers large-scale support to the education sector, and provides much-needed resources and textbooks to every primary school. So far, 15 million textbooks were distributed around the country, and an additional distribution of 7 million is planned.

HARARE, 7 November 2011 (IRIN) - Poverty, abuse and cultural practices are preventing a third of Zimbabwean girls from attending primary school and 67 percent from attending secondary school, denying them a basic education, according to a recent study which found alarming dropout rates for girls. ''Sexual harassment and abuse by even school teachers and parents, cultural issues, lack of school fees, early marriage, parental commitments and early pregnancies are some of the contributing factors to the dropout by the girl child,'' said the authors of "Because I am a Girl" by Plan International, a nonprofit organisation that works to alleviate child poverty.

According to the Plan International report, the long distances that children in rural areas have to travel to reach school, and the burden that girl children face because they often have to assume the responsibilities of being head of the household after the death of their parents, are other factors contributing to the high dropout rate for girls.

A 2005 government programme of forced evictions, known as Operation Murambatsvina (Drive out Trash), which uprooted some 700,000 people from urban areas across the country, compounded the difficulties of accessing education for girls from affected households. Amnesty International, in its report ''Left Behind: The Impact of Zimbabwe's Forced Evictions on the Right to Education'' released in October 2011, documents the ways in which the evictions disrupted the primary and secondary education of an estimated 222,000 children.

Siphiso Nyoni, 15, races home when the final bell rings at Luveve High School in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city because she shares an accounts textbook with five other classmates and needs to get her homework done as soon as possible. "You are sometimes forced to rush through the assignment and in the process make silly mistakes because someone is waiting to take her turn using the same textbook," she told IRIN.

In January 2010 the Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture put the ratio of text books to pupils at about one to 10, but teachers in the capital, Harare, have reported instances of 40 pupils sharing one text book at some schools. "It is difficult to teach and motivate pupils when a whole class has to share five textbooks," said Aquillina Dhliwayo, the accounts teacher at Luveve High. The school devised a scheme in which pupils living in the same neighbourhood were put into clusters so they could share textbooks more easily.

Legislators have predicted a catastrophic year epitomised by poor pass rates and falling standards in the education sector ahead of next Tuesday's official schools opening day as a result of poor funding.

"The ministry will have to drastically revise downwards its stated objectives for 2011 as reflected in the blue book. The impact of the downward revision will be catastrophic. The ministry envisages poor pass rates, low quality education, lack of or no supervision of the education delivery mechanism, inadequate teaching materials and the continual mushrooming of illegal schools operating on the sidelines of conventional schools," reads part of the Parliamentary report.

the committee said the funds were inadequate to address the plight of teachers whose salaries are currently being topped-up through a controversial teacher incentive scheme. The budget was also said to have not prioritised secondary education.

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