97.5 million US dollars, or 57.42 billion CFA is the additional funding giving to the Cameroon Education Reform Programme after first year of implementation.
This was announced by Laurent Serge Etoundi Ngoa, Minister of Basic Education while presiding the second ordinary session of the Programme last week Friday November 27 2020 at Mont Febe Hotel Yaoundé.
One year after the first session of the Programme Steering Committee was held and where the Steering took the commitment to work towards the success of the implementation of the Programme, this second session aimed at examining the state of implementation one year after.
“It is notably a question of monitoring the different components performance evolution as well as their disbursement indicators and giving directives and orientations for the improvement of their execution, as prescribed by decree N°134/PM of 10 December 2018 on the creation, organisation and functioning of the Support Programme for Education Reform in Cameroon, in its article 9”, Minister Laurent Serge Etoundi Ngoa told Steering Committee members.
While lauding the World Bank and Global Partnership for Education for the additional funding said that the new funding will strengthened the programme’s indicators for improving the quality of education.
These indicators include the number of teachers to be recruited, the number of textbooks to be distributed and the rate of possession of the textbook per student as well the extension of the period of execution of the programme from 04 to 06 years.
The funding the Basic Education highlighted should be an invitation for the Programme to get more involve in achieving more progress towards meeting up with challenges faced in regard to new target and activities that came along with the additional funding.
Some of the achievements of the Programme so far include; recruitment of 18,000 teachers at a rate of 3 per public primary school with more than one hundred pupils, where there is a glaring shortage of teachers; the free distribution of essential textbooks to all public primary schools in the country, the training of 120 000 teachers (public and private) in the use of the new curricula, the enrolment of more than 40,000 students in community preschool centres in rural areas, systematisation of the evaluation of the learning achievements of primary and lower secondary school pupils, the implementation and gradual decentralization of an Integrated Information and Education Management System, support for schools in municipalities hosting refugees and internally displaced persons, and the introduction of Performance Based Funding to 5,000 public primary schools nationwide to improve performance.
It should be recalled that the aim of the Cameroon Education Reform Programme is to improve equitable access to quality basic education with a focus on certain targeted disadvantaged zones
