Over 1,000 hinterland teachers now trained

Though there are more than 1,000 trained teachers in Guyana’s hinterland regions, Education Minister Priya Manickchand says many more are needed to support learners there.

It is for this reason the Education Ministry is on an aggressive push to get all teachers trained or in training by 2025. The ministry is also devising ways of training more hinterland teachers without majorly disrupting children’s schooling, according to Manickchand.

However, she told Parliamentarians on Friday that training more teachers in the hinterland is a complicated venture. The ministry has to decide whether it will train teachers in batches or train them all at once.

“There has been such a dearth of training hinterland teachers…that if we were to give quotas about who can come out (for training on the coast), the place that needs the most trained teachers, which is the hinterland, would be the place that suffers the most because they have the most untrained teachers,” Manickchand said during the consideration of the 2024 budget estimates.

There are now 1,011 teachers in the hinterland regions (Regions One, Seven, Eight and Nine) compared to the 30 trained teachers in those regions in 2019.

Training more teachers is a huge focus of the government.

A whopping $74 billion has been allocated directly to the Ministry of Education, while other sums for education delivery have gone to each of the 10 administrative regions.

Within that sum is a $3 billion allocation for training and other development purposes.