Q FM Africa's Modern Radio
The Zambia National Education Coalition (ZANEC) has welcomed the progress the government, through the Teaching Service Commission, has made towards the recruitment of 30,000 teachers provided for in the 2022 education budget.
Coalition Executive Director George Hamusunga says the announcement by government that the recruitment process will be decentralized gives the coalition confidence that the process will be completed in good time.
Mr. Hamusunga is also happy with the measures that government has put in place to ensure the recruitment process is transparent and free of corruption by involving institutions such as ZAMPOST for receiving applications, the Zambia Police, Anti-Corruption Commission and Drug Enforcement Commission to provide oversight in the recruitment process.
He says this is very important because previous efforts to decentralize the teacher recruitment exercise to district level have been unsuccessful.
Mr Hamusunga says the decentralized recruitment of teachers is the hallmark of teacher retention in the schools.
He adds that that teachers must be recruited and deployed to schools that are as close to their place of residency as possible to mitigate against the prevailing housing crisis for teachers which encourages the migration of teachers deployed in rural areas back to urban areas.
And Mr. Hamusunga is therefore urging the Teaching Service Commission to consider the need to bridge the current huge gap for Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teachers which is affecting performance in these subjects as evidenced from the 2021 grade 12 results.