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Columbus Mabika Herald Reporter

Education is a key component towards the achievement of sustainable development goals and a key enabler to the realisation of national development goals envisioned towards an upper middle income economy by year 2030, a Cabinet minister has said.

Speaking during the belated launch of the Global Action Week for Education in Harare yesterday, Minister of Primary and Secondary Education, Dr Evelyn Ndlovu said the Government continued to prioritise education to improve the quality of its public investment to consolidate national development.

Global Action Week for Education took place from April 24th to May 1 to highlight the actions that promoted global education and encouraged authorities to take action to address the urgent need for universal quality education.

This year it was held under the theme; “Inclusive planning, sustainable financing and realised rights”.

“For Zimbabwe, this is particularly important since education is one of the key sectors which has a role in developing the nation’s human capital: a fundamental building block towards the realisation of National Development Goals that are key enablers in the country’s journey towards its envisioned prosperous and empowered upper-middle-income status by the year 2030,” she said.

“Not only is education important for our country’s goals, it is also important to the goals of the SADC region and the entire continent as it assists in attaining the realisation of the SADC we want and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.”

She said the Government took evident strides towards commitment to leaving no child behind in terms of education.

“It is in this vein that education financing has become the subject matter of the Zimbabwean Government,” said Dr Ndlovu. 

“In efforts to absorb children from all walks of life, our Government embraced the Education Amendment Act as a course of action towards the attainment of Sustainable Development Goal number 4 established by the United Nations in September 2015.”

On financing education, she said there was need for increased funding in the education sector as the current budget did not meet all the required needs of providing a relevant and quality education service to all eligible clients.

With support from partners, Dr Ndlovu said the Government remained committed to high-quality education through various means, saying Cabinet recently approved that schools should engage in commercial ventures, both as a means of Applied Learning as well as an education cost reduction measure.

She said there had been clarity of discourse pertaining to school dropouts, especially girls whereby early marriage and pregnancy can no longer bring down the curtain on academic                             journey.

Minister Ndlovu said the blended approach to learning and catch-up strategies introduced had realised some efficacy through the complementary use of multiple media platforms such as television, radio, and the internet.