TT gets (US)$50M World Bank loan for education

Government and Education Minister Hazel Manning were “congratulated” by the World Bank yesterday as a four-member World Bank Supervision Mission sat down to review the Fourth Basic Education Programme. The programme is being funded with a US$50 million loan from the Bank.

Manning and Planning Minister Dr Keith Rowley met with the World Bank Supervision Mission at the Twin Towers in Port-of-Spain. At the end of the hour-long meeting, Education Specialist from the Bank, Dr Alberto Rodriguez, said the Bank was particularly excited with the site-based management component of the programme. “Principals in Trinidad and Tobago for the first time are getting money today to do what they think is most important for their schools,” he said. He said the principals had “tremendous appreciation and excitement and they really feel that their schools have changed significantly because of that shift that has allowed them to make decisions”. Rodriguez said that this portion of the programme had really changed the image of the education system “from the bottom up, from the school up”.

Rodriguez said that early childhood education had been successfully implemented with a community-based approach, sometimes helping the poorest populations with direct intervention from the Government and sometimes using the private sector. He said early childrhood education was a very broad subsector which required intervention from “every possible corner of society”. He congratulated the Minister of Education and the Government as a whole for taking this huge step which had changed the face of education in this country. The loan programme started in 1997 and would end in June 2003. There is a grace period of five years and then Government begins repayment and has a 15-year period to pay off this loan. Out of the $50 million loan, Government would be spending some $48 million and it has already signalled that it would be looking to apply for a new loan aimed at producing quality education.

Education Minister Hazel Manning said that Government, using the funds, had been  able to put in place a number of early childhood care and education centres and was able to train 385 teachers. It was also able to put in place curricula for math, language arts, science, aesthetics and a pilot Spanish programme, she said.  Government was also able to put in place two tranches of textbooks, delivered to needy students in 1999 and 2002, the Education Minister stated.  She added that Government was also able to train 474 primary school teachers and build 20 primary schools, with the last five of these schools now under construction. It was able to disburse 477 School Maintenance Grants and 477 School Improvement Grants, she noted.

Manning said the programme had been a success. Though, she conceded that  some early childhood care and education centres still had to be constructed and some teachers had to be trained. Rowley said that in the past, there were problems with the rate at which the country was accessing of the Bank’s resources. But, he stressed, the Government one year ago, gave the Bank the commitment that it would do everything possible to accelerate the drawdown of the loan in order to come within the Bank’s description of “acceptable”. Noting that the Ministry of Education had achieved this objective, he congratulated the Ministry (of Education) for being able to pick up the programme and reach the point today where almost 100 percent of the loan would be spent. Rowley said this loan more or less completed the physical aspect of the education portfolio. “The next phase as we approach the bank in the coming months would be in the context of quality education - teaching, training and evaluation processes and procedures...using some of the systems that have been tried and tested in developed countries,” he said.