National Education System textbook distribution is delayed, two weeks before the official start of the 2022 school year.

The Ministry of Education and Human Development (MINEDH) assumes the fact, linking it to factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic that makes it difficult to acquire the manuals and transport them to the country, due to a lack of containers, so that they can be distributed to schools in time.

Gina Guibunda, spokesperson for the ministry, recalled that the textbook is produced outside the country, so "we face all these constraints. Right now we still don't have the books. We are late in distributing them because of Covid-19 and the lack of containers internationally."

Guibunda assured, however, that the delay in the arrival of textbooks will not affect the start of the 2022 school year, scheduled for January 31, because MINEDH is working with the Provincial Directorates (PD) of the sector, on the steps that must be followed in order to start classes on the scheduled dates.

According to the MINEDH spokeswoman, there are pedagogical guidelines to be given to the schools and they are organizing themselves so that when they start planning the lessons they can take into account this time lapse in which the book will not yet be available.

The arrival of this didactic material, essential for the teaching-learning process, is scheduled for mid-February, a week and a half after the official start of classes throughout the country.

"We expect some containers to start arriving in the first half of February," he said, adding that the sector is working so that as soon as the textbook arrives in Mozambique it will be immediately distributed to all schools in all provinces of the country.

The MINEDH spokeswoman indicated that in total 16,700,000 books have been purchased for monolingual education, about 4,000,000 for bilingual education, 600,000 for adult literacy, and 3200 books in Braille, for children with special needs, namely the visually impaired.

He stressed that, despite these constraints, everything is in place and the sector is preparing for the start of the school year on January 31 throughout the country.