01 Mar 2016

The Assistant Minister of Education and Skills Development, Mr Moiseraela Goya has said the performance of Botswana in terms of educating the people cannot be underestimated especially that Botswana is a young nation with only 50 years of independence.

Speaking at an Educated and Informed pillar conference recently, Mr Goya said the country has achieved significant strides in development agendas for education especially at basic education level.

He however, indicated that there is still the need to expand education opportunities to accommodate all eligible learners including those with special needs in order to raise the level of quality by offering a curriculum that equips learners with a broad general education, specialist knowledge and critical skills.

Mr Goya said quality education not only make people employable, but also gives them skills and values to address the tensions between human development and planetary boundaries.

“You will observe that despite huge achievements in enrollments rates through building more schools and providing state of the art facilities, in some cases student achievement in terms of quality scores continued to decline over the past years,” he said.

He explained that decline is a pointer to the need to shift focus towards a system that provides students with non-cognitive skills as well as educating for social cohesion, global competitiveness, creativity and social development.

Mr Goya said his ministry continues to make efforts to infuse Information, Communication Technologies (ICT) into teaching and learning. He however, said there is need to do more in terms of provision of computers and Internet to learners in the schools to further enhance teaching and learning.

He said in order to address the 21^st century challenges, there is need to continually review and support curriculum developers in designing holistic and relevant school curricula that includes transformative educational and teaching approaches and strengthening teachers’ competency through continued professional development and training, among other things.

Mr Goya said his ministry has recognised that indeed there is need to redouble efforts as stakeholders to ensure that the education system at all levels provides learners with skills and values that will enable them to be adaptive and function in the global village

He indicated that the transformation of institutions such as Human Resource Development Council, Botswana Qualification Authority and Botswana Examination Council  are geared towards improving the education and skills of the people in the entire education chain.

The European Union Representative, Ms Katrin Hagemann said Europe sees Botswana as a success story of mainland Africa and analysts frequently point to the country’s continued investment in education.

Ms Hagemann said since independence there has been tremendous achievements by Botswana in improving access for all children to education.

“For the younger generation of Batswana, the last decades have also seen a great increase in the opportunities for higher education and for technical and vocational education,” she said.

She, however, indicated it is no longer enough to pass examinations with flying colours, but it is critical that students are better positioned to compete with others globally.

“No successful economy can be isolated from the rest of the world’s economy and Botswana as a small economy is dependant for its revenues on exports to the rest of the world,” she said.

She appreciated that with the Education and Training Sector Strategic Plan, Botswana has positioned the education system to better place and prepares students for global competition.

“This plan has everything that the country needs to undertake in order to position itself as globally leading education provider,” said Ms Hagemann.

Vision 2016 chairperson, Mr Martin Makgatlhe explained that 2036 consultations do not mean Vision 2016 has folded up and the old vision will set a basis for the new vision.

He said the objectives of the two day conference was to evaluate progress on The Educated and Informed nation pillar in terms of access, quality and relevance, to assess the extent to which ICT has impacted learning in the education sector and to provide future direction to sustainable education development post Vision 2016.

The theme of the conference was Quality Education for Sustainable Development: Towards a Global Competitive knowledge based economy. Ends