Ministry of education needs to provide variety of books

Despite some major achievements in the education sector in Rwanda, there is still a lot to be put in place for education to thrill. As the Ministry of Education is working tirelessly towards achieving the goals of education, it must be aware that little will be achieved if there is lack of the reading culture in the whole country. The education sector is one of the most growing sectors of the Rwandan economy. This is because of the introduction of free primary education, where the enrolment has tremendously increased. The quality of education has been affected by lack of books and scholastic materials in almost all schools in Rwanda. The need for books has become an urgent issue as the country has joined the East African Community, a body that uses English as the medium of communication. I would greatly call upon the Ministry of Education to look for different types of book publishers such as Macmillan, Fountain Publishers, Jomo-Kenyatta Publishers and MK to ease teaching in schools. A reader’s interest is boosted when they access books written by different authors and with different publishers. Conversely, readers get bored when they read books published by one or two houses. It is a remarkable psychological concern. There are so far no new books in libraries in Rwanda. If school libraries are provided with the necessary books and students given a wider range of materials, then teaching and learning would be effective. This year, the ministry introduced new subjects like creative performance, entrepreneurship, Social Studies, yet there are no books available for teachers to use. Another incident was when a Ugandan was told to teach the politics of Rwanda, without having any resource books. Yes, a teacher is supposed to improvise and to be creative but sometimes it goes beyond normal. If there are no books to use in Rwanda, then the government should also improvise and devise means of providing all that there is to facilitate teaching and learning. Although government has invested significantly in education to address the challenges and improve the quality of education in Rwanda, much more is needed. There is need for a massive campaign to mobilise any sort of text books and reading materials, as there are no any significant amount of English reading material in Rwanda to talk of right now. In order for the Ministry of Education to cater for the demands of human psyche, it has to offer chance readers to access a variety of books-different publishers and different authors tend to check boredom. shebs10@yahoo.com