The Minister of Education and Culture, Samaria Tovela, says that negotiations are already underway with some national printers so that school books can be printed in the country.
"We're discussing it with the printers. We're discussing in order to have a cost that our state can bear. That's the point. The discussion is really about having a bearable cost. That's our intention, that's what we want," said the Minister of Education and Culture, quoted in the newspaper "O País".
"We all know that printing here means having, during the interruption period, workers who are our fellow citizens, it means money circulation, increased income for our population. It's a bearable cost".
"We're interacting with some printers about the cost of books, so that it's bearable for the state," she explained, and then left another challenge, taking into account the 2026 school year.
"Some of us are going to print here this year. That's what we're doing. What we want is that, gradually, internally, we can have the capacity, because it's a huge amount."
On the subject of the 2025 school year, Samaria Tovela said that the distribution process was underway and stressed that the distribution would be completed by the end of this month.
"Seven days ago, we had distributed 87%. I'll have the balance on Monday. Then we'll know how much, but we're going to distribute all the books by the end of March. The books are reaching the students."
Although she says that the book is reaching the students, she recognizes that there are some difficulties due to Cyclone Jude.
"We have a little problem, because of the cyclone we had, in Nampula, the interruption of our road (...) We were trying to see how we, in relation to the transporters, could effectively finish the distribution, which is the last part we have, the last part that arrived."
He said that, as of Monday, alternatives could be found to get the material to those places where the roads were blocked.
"It was exactly to see if they were going to do some transportation by stopping where the road doesn't allow them to and transporting the boxes to another car that's in a slightly safer place. But, at the moment, the constraint is the damaging effects of the cyclone. ... but we are already working with a focus on exactly those places, so that our children can have the book."
She was speaking on Sunday at the WMO square in Maputo, on the sidelines of the organization's 52nd anniversary celebrations.
Leave a Reply