Majaliwa directs ministry to monitor education agents

Senior Journalist with The Citizen

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He said all colleges where young Tanzanians are taught must have standards and their courses be those that can bring benefits to Tanzanians

Dar es Salaam. Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa yesterday instructed the ministry of Education, Science and Technology to continue managing and closely monitoring the conduct of agencies registered to coordinate students who go to study at universities abroad in order to avoid fraud by fake agents.
He said that all colleges where young Tanzanians are taught must have standards and their courses be those that can bring benefits to Tanzanians.
“We are saying this because the agencies that help us find foreign colleges are also doing business. One may be just be taking money and not looking at the quality of the college and the courses he is going to send our students to...,” he exuded.
The prime minister said this while opening the 17th exhibition of higher education, science and technology organised by the Tanzania Commission for Universities (TCU) with the theme; “Higher education that meets the needs of the labour market for social and economic development.”
The goal of the government, he said, was to ensure that the relevant organisation or institution registered by meeting the criteria provides good guidelines for Tanzanians so that when they go there they are aware of the courses they are going to take and whether they are recognized by TCU.
Thus, he instructed TCU to stay close to those institutions/agencies (at least 23 have been registered), monitor their behaviour and the guidelines they give to young Tanzanians as he asked students to use the opportunity of the exhibition to get the certainty from TCU to satisfy themselves with any agency.
However, the premier expressed his satisfaction with the implementation of his directives he gave in 2017 during such exhibitions where major adjustments have been made in the issues of student registration to go abroad where complaints have decreased to a large extent.
One of the challenges identified at that time included the inconvenience to many young people who finished their studies abroad while they lost money by studying courses at unrecognised colleges and after finishing they found out that their credentials were not per TCU standards.
On the other hand, he said that the government continued to closely monitor the conduct of educational and training institutions to determine whether the education provided and the skills acquired by graduates reflects its development goals and needs of the labour market at large.
“The world we live in continues to change at a high speed and in order to keep up with that speed we have to plan ourselves to change while everyone of us is responsible as we should,” he said.