Death of education policy?

was on the road to economic development and sustainance.
Colleges for agriculture and technical education were swamped with keen students who wanted to improve their lives after the trauma of the war of liberation.
The policy of education with production was a wonderful vision in preparation for the land resettlement programme that followed 10 years later.

A former British Ambassador to Zimbabwe remarked that there were more white farmers at the graduation ceremony at one of the colleges of agriculture than the parents and relatives of the students graduating.
The reason was that the farmers were keen to employ the brightest students as farm managers.
After the land resettlement programme, are there more farmers at these graduating ceremonies than the parents and relatives of the students?
How many of our farmers are employing these graduates? It has been reported that the graduates from these colleges are now being recruited by farmers in the region through the Internet just like their counterparts in technical colleges who are being recruited to work as far as Australia and in the region.

Therefore, education with production policy has been benefiting other countries at the expense of Zimbabwe that gave them the education.
We were being told that there was a lack of foreign currency to do business in Zimbabwe but the situation has hardly improved with the advent of the multi-currency system.
Another aspect of the policy of education with production is that it has lost its steam.
We are told daily that production on the farms and in factories is at its lowest since independence.

Surely, after 31 years, there should have been many skilled farmers and technicians for our industry.
It is true that our economy is agro-based which means that, what is produced on the farms should be the in put primary products required by the manufacturing industry. But the products in the shops are imported from countries that employ our graduates.
This means the policy of education with production is being used effectively by those countries that employ our graduates.

But there are some students of agriculture scattered all over the rural areas who are benefiting from the policy.
One married woman from a village in Guruve enrolled to do a course in agriculture instead of her husband because he could not read and write.
After six months, she obtained a certificate and a master farmer’s badge for her efforts.

When she returned home, she pinned the badge on her husband’s jacket to the amusement of the villagers.
But she was now equipped with education with production.
For years now, she has used the knowledge of farming to improve her family.

The family managed to send their four children to university and built a beautiful homestead through the proceeds of their farming activities.
Short courses for resettled farmers are very crucial if production is to improve on the farms.
Technical courses should be a must for those small scale business enterprises that are receiving support from the Ministry of Small Enterprises.

Many people are engaged in the informal sector but they have never received any formal training at all. Short courses for those engaged in making furniture, door and window frames would go a long way to improve their skills.
Many houses in the rural areas are being built without any architectural plans. Maybe the builders are just experienced brick layers but without any formal training. Some churches are running formal training centres in some areas but many districts do not have those facilities at all.

Now that community trusts are being set up for ownership of mining and other resources in the rural areas, there is a need for more training centres for many rural folk to improve production in many sectors other than agriculture.

If the funds are utilised in a transparent manner, the rural people would cease to rely on their relatives in the urban centres for sustenance.
Education with production should form the backbone policy to produce enough food to feed the nation and for export. The problem is that, no statistics are available as to how effective the policy has been over the years. In the rural areas, subsistence farming is the mainstay of the method of sustenance.

Sometime ago, I addressed students at a college that is involved in food science and technology.
On being asked whether they were applying the knowledge of food technology to produce butter and cheese in their rural homes, unfortunately, they were not and all they wanted was to go and work in factories in urban areas.

In Europe, old women make butter and cheese from milk produced on their small holdings and yet our students armed with degrees in food science cannot do the same. There is no value addition to the milk produced in the rural areas except to use the fresh milk for tea etc or to let the milk go sour.

There are many examples where education is not being applied to improve the lives of communities or the nation. An inventory has to be taken to assess the effectiveness of the application of knowledge in our country.

We cannot afford to parrot that our education is one of the best in world when there is very little application of this knowledge to the betterment of society.