558 Students Graduates From Karonga Teachers' Training College

Five hundred and fifty eight students from Karonga, Rumphi and other surrounding districts have graduated from Karonga Teacher Training College after completing a one-year theoretical Initial Primary Teacher Education (IPTE) studies.

Karonga District Education Manager (DEM) representative, Colby Kaunda has since asked the graduating students to be ambassadors of climate change in the communities they will be teaching and work towards improving the environmental conservation.

"Government has put climate change as one of its priorities and as we all aware that teachers have access to many people especially the young ones we expect you to be ambassadors of climate change. Go and assist learners and the community to address issues that foster the environmental degradation," Kaunda told the graduating students earlier this week.

He said that government expected the teachers to be dedicated to their job and contribute meaningfully to delivery of quality of education.

Kaunda was particularly delighted to note that there were more female graduating students, a development he said would help in encouraging girls, who in most cases drop out of school, to take their studies seriously.

"Amongst the graduates, we have 330 females and 228 males; we hope that these female teachers will be role models to the young girls." he said.

In his speech, Karonga District Commissioner Emmanuel Bambe assured the graduating students that government is aware of challenges faced by teachers in Karonga and Malawi as a whole. He therefore asked the graduands to exercise patience while government is trying to address these issues.

"Karonga district has a huge gap in terms of accommodation for teachers. For every three teachers that we have, only one has an access to a government house, and this means that the rest have to find accommodation somewhere else," Bambe said.

Karonga has a population of about 300 000 people of which 100,000 are primary school children, a condition that is forcing every teacher to have a class of more than 400 pupils.

"Let me assure you that government recognizes the importance of a teacher, and we are working tirelessly to make sure that all these challenges are solved," the District Commissioner assured them.

Apart from the IPTE programme, Karonga teacher training college has also 694, and 865 teachers for Open Distance Learning 2 and 3 respectively who are out in various schools.