A serious problem has emerged in Uzbekistan's education sector. By the end of August, not a single one of the 6,300 planned interactive whiteboards had been delivered to the country's general education schools. The delivery of 1,000 new computer classes has also stalled.

The situation was raised at a meeting of the Legislative Chamber by deputy Zukhriddin Mavlonov, who demanded explanations from the relevant ministry as to why the 350 billion soums allocated from the budget had not been spent by the start of the school year.

The Ministry of Preschool and School Education attributed the delay to bureaucratic procedures and a revision of procurement volumes. Head of the ministry E'zoza Karimova explained that project parameters had to be adjusted on the fly: after an expert review, the number of computer kits was decided to increase to 1,350, which is why the tender was announced late.

As for electronic boards, a failure occurred — the first July competition was declared void, and on August 10 the procurement had to be relaunched. The ministry, however, expects to complete all procedures much earlier than the annual deadline. According to Karimova, deliveries of equipment to schools are planned to be fully completed by the end of October.

Earlier, the National Agency for Quality Assurance in Education denied reports that teachers in schools were allegedly unofficially restricting their teaching load to 20 hours to free up additional hours for employing graduates of pedagogical universities.

Source: podrobno.uz