The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has donated more than 25 000 Venda text books to 63 schools in the Beit Bridge district. The books were published by Longman South Africa.

The local senior education officer, Mr Siyafa Moyo, told Limpopo Mirror that they had received the consignment from South Africa a week ago. Moyo said that the latest development was in line with the recent government policy to include formerly marginalized indigenous languages into the neighbouring country’s education curriculum.

“The Venda language is now being taught in all primary schools in Beit Bridge district up to Grade 7, unlike in the past when it was only taught up to Grade 3 and in a few selected schools. This is in accordance with the new government policy on local languages, which we are now implementing,” he said. Moyo said they had also started conducting training workshops on the teaching of the language.

“We have a critical shortage of teachers who are conversant with Venda in the district. Therefore we have now embarked on a teacher training programme, so that our teachers are able to teach the language. We are conducting workshops for our teachers at school and cluster level to help them improve their writing skills in the Venda language.

“We have also engaged a resources teacher to monitor and evaluate the teaching of Venda as well as to train teachers,” he said. Moyo said the first group of learners would sit for the Grade 7 examinations in 2013 after the completion of the ongoing pre-testing and item-writing exercise.

The Zimbabwean government issued a directive in 2008 for the inclusion of Venda, to be taught up to secondary level in Beit Bridge District. However, a lack of funds to publish the textbooks was a major challenge. The language is already being taught at Great Zimbabwe University after the University of Venda had offered to deploy lecturers to assist in the teaching of the programme.

The district Venda co-ordinator, Mr Samuel Mulaudzi, said a committee was tasked with overseeing the development of the Venda curriculum to improve the syllabuses from Grade 3 to higher levels. Mulaudzi said a writers’ forum had since been formed to come up with a series of Venda textbooks.