27 Oct 2015

Chairperson of Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) managing committee,  Ms Angelina Motshekga, paid a courtesy call on Minister of Education and Skills Development, Dr Unity Dow, in Gaborone on Monday (October 26).

 The two ministers shared ideas on the education sector, how SACMEQ had settled in Botswana and the SACMEQ Assembly of Ministers billed for Gaborone from November 26 to 27, 

The assembly will be attended by ministers from the 16 member countries being; Botswana, Angola, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania (Mainland), Tanzania (Zanzibar), Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. 

Ms Motshekga, who is also South Africa’s minister of basic education, said hosting SACMEQ Coordinating Centre offices was a good opportunity for Botswana as the centre kept key information of 16 governments, which could be used for research, benchmarking, policy development and budgetary purposes. 

South Africa, she said, was chairing the current session of SACMEQ and would be handing over to Swaziland at the next SACMEQ meeting, adding that a new chair was appointed bi-annually.

Ms Motshekga said the SADC education ministers took a decision to relocate SACMEQ Coordinating Centre offices from Paris, France, where it was based from 2006 to 2014.  

The offices moved to Botswana in January this year. 

“All of us wanted to host SACMEQ. So, we are really grateful and humbled for you. This is a very prestigious and important institution for SADC, because it assesses extremely superior tools like the quality of education in the region,” she said.

She noted that “there are similar institutions like East Africa, which have their own tools, but SACMEQ tools are quite superior and even other countries are talking to us to see if we could share those measurement tools,” she added.

For her part, Dr Dow expressed gratitude for Ms Motshekga’s visit, saying Botswana was honoured to be hosting SACMEQ and the upcoming ministers assembly.

She echoed sentiments that, “without research; you can not budget, you can not know if your curriculum needs review or whether you need policy and legislative review.  We value research and we are grateful that UB, as a research facility as well, saw it fit to admit and accept to host SACMEQ.”

“It is a lot of data. So, other professors here and in the region should know that there is a bank of data, as SACMEQ that they could tap on to do other research and analyse it further for other purposes,” she added.

The Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality was officially launched in Zimbabwe in February 1995. 

This landmark for the Southern Africa sub-region consolidates a four-year period of capacity-building programmes in educational planning undertaken, as co-operative activities by the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) and Ministries of Education and Culture in Southern Africa. 

The main aim of SACMEQ was to provide policy advice to key decision makers on educational quality issues considered as high priority by their respective ministries of education. 

To meet this objective, the project was designed to provide opportunities for educational planners in the Southern Africa sub-region to work together, learn from each other, and share experience and expertise. Ends