Teacher training and bilingual education

Finland has promised to donate US$10 million to Mozambique to improve the quality of the education sector in the southern African country, APA learnt here on Saturday.Private daily newspaper O Pais quoted Finnish ambassador to Mozambique, Seija Toro as saying priorities included teacher training and bilingual education in the children’s African mother tongues and in the official language, Portuguese.“The teachers are a key piece in the children’s teaching and learning process and the more trained they are the better will be the quality of education. Bilingual education is also important because when the children arrive at school, they do not speak Portuguese. Bilingual education is a way of ensuring that the children easily assimilate the materials,” Toro said while addressing the annual review meeting of the Education Strategic Plan for 2012-2016.For his part, Mozambican Education Minister Jorge Ferrao said the grant would be an added value to the efforts to improve the quality of education in the country.Recognising that Mozambique is prone to natural disasters which often destroy schools, Ferrao said that one of the priorities of his Ministry is to improve school buildings. A project is thus under way to guarantee greater resistance of schools.“Even in those schools which have already been built, we shall have to make some modifications to ensure greater resistance”, he said. “We shall begin with 1,400 schools in Manica, Sofala, Zambezia, Nampula, Cabo Delgado, Inhambane and Niassa provinces”.To make this project viable a partnership has been formed involving the government, the World Bank, the Engineering Faculty of Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University and other specialists.