Rwanda Education Board (REB) has revealed there is a yet to be revealed list of unqualified teachers who will be sacked next academic year scheduled to commence on January 6, 2020.

Dr Irénée Ndayambaje, the Director-General of REB, confirmed the development to TNT citing the list is already prepared yet declined to reveal the number of those who will be affected.

“We have prepared the list of all unqualified teachers and submitted it to the ministry of education…the decision is that those who don’t want to study education must quit the profession,” he said.

“There will be guidance on that. We know the numbers. While they await the decision to be taken, they will be on duty as usual.” He added

Although he didn’t disclose the numbers, available statistics show that the country has 65,000 teachers whereby qualified teachers in primary schools account for 98.6 per cent while in secondary school they are 76 per cent.

Isaac Munyakazi, the State Minister in charge of Primary and Secondary Education previously told The media that all issues of unqualified teachers would be examined since the government wrote to Umwalimu Sacco requesting to facilitate teachers to get loans at low-interest rate so that they can enrol for degrees in education.

However, some teachers say that they were being denied access to loans from the SACCO, which affects their ability to upgrade their studies.

Indeed, Umwalimu SACCO was only willing to provide loans that could have been paid by December 2019 before the deadline to phase out unqualified teacher.

Ndayambaje said they have committed to improving teacher management recruitment, retention, development and monitoring.

He explained that in order to prepare qualified teachers, the cabinet decision of January 28, 2019, approved the policy to strengthen the quality of Teacher Training Colleges (TTCs) and demonstration schools.

The ministry says it is going to upgrade 16 Teacher Training Colleges to strengthen the preparation of new teachers and also upgrade 16 models schools and new ones to be constructed in UR-College of Education to support innovative instruction practices at the budget of $17.3 million.

In March 2019 the Government also increased teachers’ salaries by 10 per cent in public schools and government-aided schools as part of the incentives to retain them in the profession.