ZIMBABWE has secured US$30 million from foreign donors for the production of primary school textbooks, Education Minister David Coltart has revealed.

Coltart told parliament that donors made the money available through the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) after the government established an Education Transition Fund last December.

“That money is now going to be applied in the first instance to the production of textbooks for primary schools,” Coltart told MPs this week.

Coltart said the government would shortly sign contracts with publishing houses for the reproduction of their books.

Zimbabwe is emerging from a decade-long economic and political crisis after President Robert Mugabe and former opposition rivals Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara agreed to share power.

The crisis hit the education sector hard. Figures supplied by the Ministry of Education showed a national average of 15 primary school children sharing a single textbook.

With the new funding, Coltart said: “We aim to reduce the textbook-student ratio from 1:15 and to 1:1.”

He added that they are focusing on all textbooks required at primary school level, but for the first time text books would be printed for the so-called marginalised languages such as Kalanga, Tonga, Nambia and Suthu.

Coltart said once the textbook crisis in primary schools is resolved, the ministry will turn to secondary schools.

The minister, however, expressed doubts that the country will be able to achieve the millennium goal of ‘education for all by 2015’.

He added: “The reality is that we will not be able to deliver a quality education to all our children by 2015. We have schools, physical buildings and teachers in the classrooms but the reality is that our education system has declined dramatically in the last two decades.”