Murigande pledges more funding to NCDC

Newly appointed education minister, Charles Murigande, has said that he will consider increasing the budget of the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCD) to meet the challenges of the centre following the changes in the education system. He said this yesterday after he conducted an orientation tour of NCDC and the Rwanda National Examination Centre (RNEC), both located in Remera. “I have noticed that the biggest challenge is the limited finances. The centre could do more if it had enough resources, and as the Minister of Education, I will look at how the financial resources can be increased,” he said an interview. Murigande also praised NCDC’s efforts that have been applied to make possible the various changes in the education system. “They have done an outstanding job in a very transparent manner.” Some of the uphill tasks that the centre has faced include the recently passed directive of adopting English as a language of instruction at all levels of education in the country. This meant that instructional material had to be translated and NCDC was faced with an urgent situation of translating text books from French to English which also had to be urgently distributed to different schools in the country. However, the minister said that there are many schools still lacking text books. Charles Gahima, NCDC’s Director General, showed the minister a store full of text books ready for distribution. Meanwhile, Gahima said that the centre is quickly losing workers due to a low salary scale, saying that so far, 35 employees have quit in the last three years. He added that the centre loses out when employees on whom it has spent in terms of capacity building leave for better-paying jobs. Currently, the body in charge of countrywide curriculum has 67 workers out of the required 84. It is also faced with producing educational literature for the newly introduced subjects such as general paper and entrepreneurship. Murigande is currently pushing through parliament a bill that will merge the NCDC with RNEC. Ends