When the Minister of Finance, Neal Rijkenberg, in his 2022/23 Budget Speech announced an allocation to the Ministry of Education and Training of E3.53-billion to cater for all educational and training programmes, he pointed out to Parliament and the nation that “if we were to add to this figure the Orphans and Vulnerable Children grants and scholarships, which also support education and training, it grows to E4.05-billion, which is approximately 16 percent of the total national budget and places the Kingdom of Eswatini in the top 10 percent of education spending in Sub-Saharan Africa. With this huge investment made by tax-payers, we challenge educators and learners to ensure that Emaswati reap correspondingly significant rewards”.
The Minister continued the Budget Speech by declaring that government has demonstrated its commitment to turning around the economy to achieve macro-fiscal stability and growth through the Strategic Roadmap, accompanied by improvements in human capital development. Recognising the importance of human capital as a contributor to economic growth, he said, government has received support from the World Bank for a Human Capital Project that is geared towards holistic child-development, improving learning outcomes for school-going children, and adequately preparing adolescents and the youth to become globally competitive and productive citizens.
Rijkenberg highlighted how the kingdom had entered 2022 with an additional 100 public schools in locales all over the country benefiting from government’s rollout of the Grade Zero programme: the latter was said to have been further bolstered by support received through UNICEF in mapping Early Childhood Care and Development Education, the main objective being to obtain a broad understanding of the current state of Early Childhood Care centres.