The local government in Yei River County in Central Equatoria State has reported shortages of teachers in most of the schools located in remote villages.
Samuel Henry, Yei River County Commissioner, said on Radio Tamazuj’s regular programme ‘With the Commissioner’ that he made a tour to four payams in order to assess challenges and found that many schools lack teachers or lack qualified teachers.
“The challenges we have here are the shortages of teachers, and very few that we have are qualified.”
Some schools have as few as six teachers. He said it is impossible for six teachers to teach more than two hundred students in each school. The commissioner stressed that they have asked the national education ministry to send more teachers to fill the gap.
Asked about previous cases of sexual abuse of students by teachers, Henry said, “Since I assumed my office, I did not hear of issues of rape cases in Yei River County.”
Meanwhile, the commissioner has also reported that they have not received any conflict-displaced people from Wonduruba or elsewhere in the Equatoria region, in spite of the serious violence that occurred in those areas in recent weeks.
“But we have some refugees from Congo almost 8,000 and 2,000 other refugees from Nuba Mountains, but we don’t have IDPS in the area,” said the commissioner, adding that the security in the area is quite normal and the communities are peaceful.