The Minister of Education, Samaria Tovela, has guaranteed that all public schools in the country will have free textbooks available by the end of March, the Agência de Informação de Moçambique (AIM) reported on Thursday (6).
According to the government official, there are already some books available for primary and secondary education in digital format and they are also being shared across the country.
‘The books are already in all the provinces, and now they’re putting them in schools. We’d like the distribution of the physical textbooks to be finalised by February, but given the state of the access roads, that won’t be possible,’ said Tovela. ‘That’s why we’re working to ensure that, by the end of March at the latest, the books are in all the schools.’
In recent years, the Mozambican education system has faced difficulties in the distribution of school textbooks, problems that are related to the hiring of unqualified professionals as coordinators and authors of the books, some of which, in 2022, contained serious errors in the subjects of Geography, Maths and History.
Meanwhile, in order to avoid delays in the distribution of books, the Mozambican Association of Printing Industries (AIGM) has called on the government to give priority to national printing companies through favourable public tenders that give priority to existing capacities in the country, instead of favouring foreign companies, especially those of Portuguese origin.
But despite the fact that national companies have the capacity to print books, funding agencies insist on international tenders, which are always won by non-Mozambican companies.
Last January, the government guaranteed the timely distribution of school books and said that all the conditions are already in place for the start of the 2025 school year throughout the country.
