By EDDIE OSIFELO
MINISTRY of Education and Human Resources has experienced a budget cut in is recurrent budget.
A total of $1.2 billion of the $4 billion national budget was allocated to Education this year.
Minister, Lannelle Tanangada told Parliament on Tuesday that the recurrent budget for her Ministry was reduced by $147,459,510, which is a 12.2% reduction for 2021 compared to the 2020 recurrent budget.
She said this decrease is primarily due to the revenue pressures experienced as stated in the Ministry of Finance and Treasury 2021 Budget Strategy paper (and which the Minister of Finance and Treasury has alluded to in his speech).
“It should also be noted that my Ministry always received the highest recurrent budget from the overall Government Budget over the past years – from 24% to 35% since 2016, which is above the international bench mark of 10% to 15% of budget that governments are requested to spend on education.
“However, the analysis by subsector for administrative costs across ECE, Primary, Secondary, TVET and Tertiary shows that the scholarship budget continues to receive the highest budget allocation over the years, and for 2021, it is 58% followed by the Primary (21%) and Secondary (12%) of MEHRD budget,” she said.
Minister Tanangada said the ECE and TVET have the lowest share of 3% and 2% respectively in the 2021 budget, however these last two sectors have the smallest number of students.
