Project to improve students’ performance

Edukans executive director Limbani Nsapato says his organisation is implementing a mentorship project in Nsanje to improve national examination results of primary and secondary school students.

He said this on Saturday when Edukans trained teachers from Mlonda, Magoti and Fatima zones in the district on how to engage fellow teachers on teaching methodologies.

“At first the programme was targeting 40 schools in the district, 30 primary and 10 secondary schools, but we have scaled up the number by adding 28 schools so that the district should improve its performance during national examinations,” said Nsapato.

Speaking in an interview after the training, Phokera Primary School head teacher Peter Kapenda said the training will improve education quality in the district.

“We acquired skills on how to guide teachers on the best way of teaching and handling learners so that our learners should perform well in national examinations,” he said.

Kapenda said the mentorship programme will motivate teachers to remain in schools for a long time and benefit learners as changing of teachers affects performance.

Thangadzi 1 Primary School teacher Margaret Mtungila said besides learning about good communication, they were also mentored on how to use teachers and learners’ modules.

Nsanje district senior education officer Mcknowledge Maganizo said the project has helped them to see areas which are not doing well and rectify them.

“We noticed that absenteeism of teachers and learners is one of the factors leading to the district’s poor performance,” he said.

Maganizo said they have since introduced daily registers to address absenteeism.

With support from Unicef, Edukans is implementing the project from November 2022 to August 2023.