Report critical of primary education angers minister

Tanzania's education minister, Joseph Mungai, has threatened to deregister an NGO that produced a report critical of the government’s efforts to reform primary education. The report has "sweeping comments and misleading information" he said on Tanzanian radio and newspapers on Wednesday. The 21-page document issued by the Tanzanian NGO Hakielimu reviews reforms began in 2002. It found that enrolment was lower in 2004 than 2003 and that a lower percentage of girls had enrolled. "The proportion of girls in primary schools fell from 49.3 percent in 2001 to 48.8 percent in 2004," Hakielimu said in the report. The minister responded: "If Hakielimu continues to issue sensational statements on the performance of the education sector, I will lodge my complaints to the registrar of NGOs and ask for it’s deregistration." The Hakielimu report does offer some praise for the reforms which did away with school fees. "There is no doubt that the implementation of PEDEP [primary education development programme] has brought about positive changes in primary schools," it said. When the programme began in 2002, it said, enrolments rose more than ever before and schools received more textbooks. The government also succeeded in recruiting 32,325 teachers in 2002, which are 1,064 more than the target set. Even so, there are still fewer teachers per pupils now than before, the report said, as well as a glaring difference in the teacher-pupil ratio in various parts of the county. The eastern region of Kilimanjaro has an average of one teacher to 44 pupils while in the remote western region of Shinyanga the ratio is one to 87. For the education minister, Hakielimu’s report does not help the system. "My teachers work very hard and under difficult conditions. They should be encouraged and not intimidated," he said.