Editorial: Embracing This Week’s Suacoco Consultative Conference

This week marks another significant moment of our growth and development as a people in our country’s history. Considering the fact that education is the bedrock of any developing society, we consider this week as very significant.

The government of Liberia, through the Ministry of Education, with support from the United States Agency for International Development or USAID and other development partners, will on tomorrow, Thursday begin a three-day consultative workshop at the Cuttington University in Suacoco, Bong County.

Under the theme “Transforming Education for Sustainable Growth and Development’, the conference will take stock, monitor and evaluate the gains made so far, as well as recommend sound policy alternatives for strengthening, improving and maintaining the educational system for a better Liberia. This education forum will allow Liberians to seize a moment, nationalize and define their education destiny.

This National Education Consultative Conference, scheduled for February 3-5, is the vanguard-education gathering for Liberia, bringing together educators and academicians, governance experts, legal minds, policy makers, traditional leaders, faith-based organizations, the media and civil society groups. For the first time since 1984, the Liberian government and its partners are convening this conference to carefully examine and update the country’s major education policies from basic education to management of the sector.

The outcomes of this week’s conference will ensure that we develop the talented productive, ambitious and patriotic young men and women capable of transforming Liberia into a nation that reaches its potential. We at the New Dawn-Liberia see this Conference as not only timely, but worth-wide, most especially at a time when the Liberian government has been struggling to revitalize its educational system desecrated and devastated by more than a decade of  intermittent civil conflicts

We do testify that since its incumbency five years ago, the government continues to exerts efforts, in partnership with friendly international organizations to  define and maintain minimal quality standards in our educational system and provide access and opportunities for learning to children, adolescent and adults  throughout the country.

We are also aware that in an effort to strengthen the educational sector, the government has over the years increased access to basic education, restructured and opened three teachers training institutes, as well as procured and distributed textbooks for the basic education sub-sector, reviewed and revised the basic education curriculum and provided opportunities for more teachers to be trained at the tertiary level.

Considering the need for sustained quality education, the government of Liberia has also prepared a new education act which is currently under review. When passed into law, the new education act, will, among other things, emphasize the decentralization of the Liberian education system and help facilitate the delivery of quality education at all levels and sectors of our society, with the development of a medium term plan.

We commend the Ministry of Education for such undertakings, with the ardent belief that this week’s Suacoco National Consultative Conference will be a sincere effort on the part of the government and its partners to completely overhaul our educational system.

We also join the Education Ministry authorities led by Ernest Othello Gongar in calling on all Liberians and other partners in progress to participate in this historic moment in the transformational process of the Liberian education sector. This must be so as a way of helping to restore hope to our shaky educational system.