Northern Province, Zambia
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Northern Province is one of Zambia's nine provinces. It covers approximately one fifth of Zambia in land area. The province is divided into twelve districts and Kasama is the provincial capital. It is widely considered to be the heartland of the Bemba, a people who comprise one of the largest tribes in Zambia.
Notable land marks in Northern Province include Lake Tanganyika, Lake Bangweulu, and the corresponding wetlands, Lake Mweru Watipa, and a number of waterfalls including Lumangwe, Kabweleume, Chishimba and Kalambo Falls.
Efforts are being made by the Zambian government, along with a number of non-governmental organizations to increase the visibility of the many natural and historical treasures in the Northern Province. Tourism has proven an effective way to bring economic growth in other parts of Zambia, ie. Livingstone and Victoria Falls. However, a lack of infrastructure along the vast distances between major points of interest, makes visiting this part of the country difficult.
PROFILE OF HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION, NORTHERN PROVINCE, ZAMBIA
(The information is given by PEO, Ministry of Education, Northern province, Zambia, April 2005)
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Northern Province, with a total area of 147,286 square kilometers, is the largest of Zambia´s 9 provinces. It shares borders not only with three other provinces - Central, Eastern and Luapula, but also with three countries as well - the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo D.R.) in the north, Tanzania in the north-east, and Malawi in the east.
The province is made up of 12 districts, namely Kasama (the provincial capital), Chilubi, Isoka, Chinsali, Kaputa, Luwingu, Mbala, Mporokoso, Mpika, Mpulungu, Mungwi and Nakonde. Currently, only Kasama and Mbala have attained municipal council status, while the rest are still district councils.
2.0 PHYSICAL FEATURES
Though it is generally a plateau, the province has a diverse landscape that varies and poses different challenges as one moves from one part to another.
Among the notable physical features are the Mafinga Mountains in the north-east, which lie over 1,200 meters above sea level, on the Muchinga escarpment. Before the rehabilitation of the Isoka- Muyombe Road, which traverses them and is the shortest road link with the Eastern Province, these mountains once formed a formidable barrier between the two provinces that few but the best 4-wheel drive vehicles dared to cross, especially during the rain season. The Mbala highlands in the north are also part of the escarpment.
Several rivers and streams criss-cross the province, posing yet another great challenge to easy movement of people, goods and services. The most prominent river on the eastern side is the Luangwa, which has its source in Eastern Province. On the western side are the Chambeshi and its many tributaries. During times of very heavy rains, these rivers, particularly the Chambeshi and Luangwa, often burst their banks, resulting in the creation of large tracts of seasonal swamps along their valleys.
The province is also endowed with three large natural lakes - Lake Mweru-wa-Ntipa in Kaputa District, Lake Bangweulu in the south-west, which it shares with Luapula Province, and Lake Tanganyika in the north, which forms part of Zambia´s border with Congo D.R. and the Republic of Tanzania. The Bangweulu Swamps, which form the Bangweulu´s basin, stretch from Mpika District in the east to Chilubi District in the west and Samfya District in Luapula Province.
3.0 POPULATION
According to the 2000 Cencus of population, Northern Province has a population of 1,407,088. This represents an increase of 481,233 from 925,865 in 1990. The annual population growth rate is 4.3%, which is the highest of all the 9 provinces. 50.5% of the total population is female and 49.5% is male. Children below the age of 15 make up 49.5% of the population in the province.
Kasama, the provincial capital, is home to 12.8% of the population, which is the highest of all the 12 districts. Next is Mbala with 11.5%, followed by Nakonde with 10.9%. In terms of the annual population growth rate per district, Nakonde ranks first with 11.9%, seconded by Mungwi with 6.6% and then Mporokoso with 6.0%, while Luwingu has the lowest with 1.5%. The rest are as follows: Kaputa 5.0%, Mpulungu 4.1%, Mbala 3.8%, Chinsali and Kasama 3.7% each, Chilubi 3.0%, Isoka 2.0% and Mpika 1.7%. The population is predominantly rural, with more people living in the rural areas than in the urban centres.
The rapid annual populaton growth is attributed to various factors. For instance, the high growth rate in Nakonde is due to the free cross-border trade between Zambia and Tanzania, which has triggered rapid settlement in the district. The high economic potential of the Chambeshi River valley, especially in agriculture, explains the rapid growth rate in Mungwi, while the 6.0% for Mporokoso is attributed to the influx of refugees from Congo D.R.
4.0 LANGUAGES AND CULTURE
Northern Province has a number of tribal groups speaking different languages and dialects. However, the language mostly spoken across the province is Icibemba, which is the mother tongue of the largest tribal grouping, the Bemba people of Chinsali, Kasama, Mungwi and parts of Mporokoso and Luwingu districts. Other prominent languages include Bisa, spoken by the Bisa people of Mpika and Chilubi, Icinamwanga, spoken by the Namwanga people of Nakonde and Isoka districts, Tumbuka,spoken by the Tumbuka of Isoka, and Icimambwe, spoken by the Mambwe of Mbala district. Despite its size and the diversity of languages and dialects, the people of Northern Province generally share a common culture.
Each of these tribes has its own traditional leadership headed by either a paramount or senior chief assisted by junior chiefs and village headmen. The most prominent of the chiefs in the province is Chitimukulu, Paramount Chief of the Bemba. Others include Senior Chief Kopa of the Bisa, Senior Chieftainess Nawaitwika of the Namwanga and Senior Chief Tafuna of the Lungu and Mambwe.
5.0 ECONOMY
Northern Province has completely no industries at all, and its economic mainstay is agriculture. The most commonly grown crops are maize, millet, sorghum, groundnuts, beans and rice. Most of the food produced is consumed within the province, though a small percentage is bought by traders for re-sale along the line of rail.
There are very few farmers who grow crops on a commercial basis in the province. Most of the people are peasant subsistence farmers using the trditional "cut and burn" shifting cultivation locally known as "chitemene" and are barely able to even produce enough to feed themselves. There is also some commercial fishing bing done on Lake Tanganyika by established fishing companies in Mpulungu. Most of the fish caught is taken for sale in Lusaka and the copperbelt on refrigerated trucks. Fishing is also done by small-scale fishermen, who sell their small catches to local traders and others who resale the fish in the nearby towns of Mbala nd Kasama.
Mpulungu, 208 km from Kasama, is Zambia´s only port and its harbour is generally used to export bulky goods such as sugar and cement to Rwanda and Congo D.R. In turn, Zambia also imports Kapenta (small, dried fish) and other merchandise from these two countries, as well as Tanzania, through the same port.
6.0 COMMUNICATION
Northern Province has poor communcation infrastructure. The telecommuncation facilities are obsolete, and only the provincial capital, Kasama, has a reliable telephone service. The situation is so bad that it is easier to make a telephone call outside the province than to any other district within the province as the telephone facilities in these districts are often out of use.
On a positive note, however, there has been a gradual expansion of the recently introduced cellular phone services in the province. Apart from Kasama, three other districts - Nakonde, Mpika and Mpulungu - now have cellular phone services. (From June 2005 the cell phone service also includes Mbala district) (additional remark) Nevertheless, these cellular phone services are quite costly for government ministries to afford, and the fact that they are only found in four (five) (a.r.) out of the twelve districts in the province further limits their usefulness.
The road network too, is in a poor state. Despite having a total area of 147,286 square kilometers, the province has approximately only 900 kilometers of tarmac, a large portion of which is in dire need of rehabilitation. The rest are gravel roads, the majority of which are in so bad a state that they are almost impassable.
7.0 ADMINISTRATION OF THE PROVINCE AND DISTRICTS
The Provincial Minister is the political head of the province, and is assisted by the Provincial Permanent Secretary, who heads the Civil Service and coordinates the activities of all the government departments in the province. The Permanent Secretary is in turn assisted by the provincial heads of the various government departments.
The administration at district level is headed by the District Commissioner, who combines the role of political head with that of overseer of the Civil Service in the district. Each government department has a district head, while the municipal and district councils are headed by Mayors and Council Secretaries respectively.
8.0 THE STATE OF HIGH SCHOOLS IN THE PROVINCE
Northern Province has twenty-four high schools. Twenty-one are run by the government while four are grant-aided (managed by the Catholic Church and th United Church of Zambia with financial support from the government).
All the government high schools run from Grade 10 to 12, while the four managed by the church run from Grade 8 to 12. Six of them are single sex schools, while the rest admit both girls and boys. There are eight schools that enroll boarding pupils only, while all the others enroll both boarding and day pupils.
8.1 FINANCIAL SUPPORT TO HIGH SCHOOLS
Due to the unfavourable economic situation in the country, government has for a long time now been heavily dependent on funding from cooperating partners to support the education sector.
Before the inception of the sector-wide approach in 2003, the cooperating partners were at liberty to choose which of the three sub-sectors (basic education, high school and tertiary) they were willing to support depending on what they perceived to be the priorities. Most of them seemed to be more interested in supporting basic education than the other two sub-sectors, and it was as a result of this "fragmented" approach that we saw the introduction of the Basic Education Sub-Sector Implementation Programme (BESSIP) in 2000. BESSIP was basically a reinvestment programme meant to reverse the decline that had affected the basic education sector due to years of lack of attention from the government as a result of inadequate resources.
Under this programme, the cooperating partners channeled support to the basic school sector, and most of the funds went towards the development of infrastructure, support for programmes such as PAGE (Programme for the Advancement of Girl Education), provision of bursaries to vulnerable children and procurement of school requisites. Whilst there is no doubt that BESSIP achieved a lot, it is also true that it had a major weakness in that it resulted in the concentration of almost all the available resources and energies of the Ministry in only one sector at the expence of the other two, especially high school education, which was literally neglected.
BESSIP came to an end in 2002, and was in 2003 replaced by the Sector Plan, which takes a sector-wide approach in which the cooperating partners pool all their financial resources in one common basket from which the office of the Permanent Secretary then redistributes the available resources to all the sub-sectors according to their perceived needs.
It is worth noting that the high school sub-sector has suffered a general decline due to lack of investment over a long period, and resolving the many problems that have beset the sector over the years will certainly require a lot of goodwill from our cooperating partners as the government alone cannot manage to raise the necessary financial resources. Among the many areas that need urgent attention in the high schools in Northern Province are:
8.2 INFRASTRUCTURE
Much of the infrastructure in all the high schools in the province was constructed over thirty-five years ago and has never undergone any rehabilitation since then. Consequently, most of the classrooms, laboratories, dormitories, staff houses and other buildings are in such a dilapidated state that they ned urgent rehabilitation to save them from collapse.
Furthermore, there has been little expansion in infrastructure ever since these schools were built, and as such, the current infrastucture is too inadequate to cope with the ever-rising demand for education due to population growth. This has resulted in over-enrolment, with an average of 50 pupils per classroom.
Secondly, the shortage of classroom space has resulted in large numbers of pupils being forced out of school every year at Grade 9 for failing to make the "cut-off point" to Grade 10, which is always very high due to stiff competition for the few Grade 10 places available. The competition is very stiff because of too many Grade 9 pupils vying for the very few places in Grade 10 as a result of the rapid expansion of the basic school sector without a correspnding expansion in the high schools.
Added to this is the serious shortage of furniture in the classrooms, forcing pupils to engage in a daily scramble for the few available chairs. In the boarding schools, pupils have to take their meals either seated on the floor or while standing because there are insufficient tables and chairs in the dining halls. The situation in the dormitories is equally bad, as pupils have few mattresses and the bunkers are now bare metal frames stripped of all their wooden bases.
8.3 WATER AND SANITATION
Nearly all the high schools in the province have a critical water and sanitation problem, as their water reticulation systems have not been working for a long time now.
Many of the schools are connected to the urban water reticulation systems in their districts, but do not receive sufficient wate (if any at all) from the local water utilities for various technical reasons, such as blocked pipes or sheer lack of capacity by the local water utilities to supply them with water due to old, broken down machinery. As a solution, all the high schools have at various times tried sinking their own boreholes and equipping them at the cost of huge sums of money, but this has only brought temporary relief as the boreholes have eventually collapsed and the water pumps broken down.
The water crisis has in turn created a number of serious problems, one of them being poor sanitary conditions that exist in these schools because the ablution blocks have long ceased to be functional. The non-functioning of toilets is a matter of grave concern in any school, the situation becomes even more critical in the boarding schools, as the consequences of keeping a large group of people confined in one place without proper sanitary facilities are very obvious.
However, the sanitary problems in these schools are not only due to lack of water, but also to the dilapidated ablution blocks and sewer systems. In nearly all the schools, the ablution blocks have broken toilet pans and cisterns, while the taps are either not there at all or are broken and continuously leaking if water is available. The sewer systems are also completely run down and blocked.
8.4 STAFFING
The staffing position in the high schools in the province is another area of concern. The province has a total teacher requirement of 870, but the total teaching staff strenght in all the high schools currently stands at only 647 (176 female and 471 male), meaning that there is a shortfall of 223 teachers (2005).
One obvious consequence of the shortage of teachers is that those who are available have to be made maximum use of, leading to high individual teaching loads. In the end, the quality of education being offered has beenseriously compromised because the teachers are too overworked and cannot teach effectively.
Since 2000, the government has not been able to employ any new high school teachers due to budgetary constraints as the country struggles to reach the "Highly Indebted Poor Countries" (HIPC) completion point. Unfortanately, this has happened at the same time that the restructuring of the Ministry of Education has been "siphoning" qualified graduate teachers out of the high schools to senior administrative positions without any replacements.
As if that is not enough, the high death rate among teachers in the province has also taken its toll on staffing in the high schools, and there is no doubt that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is a major factor in the high death rate. Combating HIV/AIDS is central to the Ministry's mission in the province, and this is certainly one area in which the province requires a lot of financial and material assistance in order to fulfill its mission.
8.5 TEACHING AND LEARNING MATERIALS
The shortage of teaching and learning materials in all the high schools is also a cause of grave concern. There is a critical shortage of text-books in all the subject areas, s well as specialized equipment and raw material for technical subjects such as woodwork, metalwork and technical drawing.
Apart from being run down, the laboratories in these schools do not have apparatus, gas and chemicals to conduct even basic scientific experiments, making the effective teaching of science practically impossible. The situation is even worse in the new high schools such as Mpulungu, Chitulika, Ituna and Muchinga, which do not even have any laboratories in the first place, and yet are expected to produce future scientists to help develop the nation.
[edit] Districts
Northern Province is divided into 12 districts:
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Chibombo, Kabwe, Kapiri Mposhi, Mkushi, Mumbwa, Serenje |
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Chililabombwe, Chingola, Kalulushi, Kitwe, Luanshya, Lufwanyama, Masaiti, Mpelembe, Mufulira, Ndola |
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Chadiza, Chama, Chipata, Katete, Lundazi, Mambwe, Nyimba, Petauke |
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Chiengi, Kawambwa, Mansa, Milenge, Mwense, Nchelenge, Samfya |
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Northern Province |
Chilubi, Chinsali, Isoka, Kaputa, Kasama, Luwingu, Mbala, Mpika, Mporokoso, Mpulungu, Mungwi, Nakonde |
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Chavuma, Kabompo, Kasempa, Mufumbwe, Mwinilunga, Solwezi, Zambezi |
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Choma, Gwembe, Itezhi-Tezhi, Kalomo, Kazungula, Livingstone, Mazabuka, Monze, Namwala, Siavonga, Sinazongwe |
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