Textbook publishers face closure as govt starts printing school material
Sunday August 05 2018
Textbook publishers face closure after the government started printing its own school materials, Rwanda Today has learnt.
The government had been relying on the private publishers for production and printing of teaching and learning materials for pre-primary, primary and secondary schools in line with the recently adopted competence-based curriculum.
However, last year, the Rwanda Education Board started using educationists, mainly teachers and government officials to produce the materials, a move officials said aimed to “cut costs and overreliance on private publishers.”
Publishers who spoke to Rwanda Today said that their businesses were at stake and the effects had started to spill over to all those involved in the publishing sector.
This is because the education regulator would now be the sole producer of textbooks in a market where government tenders for school textbooks remain the only way to survive for many local and international publishers.
“Apart from REB, our clients were largely parents, private schools and NGOs involved in the education sector,” said Emmanuel Habarurema from Mountain Top Publishers.
“Many are left to work on materials other than textbooks such as dictionaries, atlases, maps and grammar books, among others which have a very limited market,” he added.
Source of revenues
The government’s education tenders remained the major source of revenue for the country’s nascent publishing industry, accounting for over 80 per cent of publishers’ total book sales revenues.
Fiston Mudacumura, a publisher, told Rwanda Today that REB’s in-house publishing initiative set a precedent so that even NGOs running education projects opted to produce their materials internally, cancelling existing contracts with publishing firms.
“Instead of becoming our clients, they are now competitors, which erode any hope for growth for many budding local publishing firms. It is expected that most of them will close shop and are only following up on a few pending payments,” he said.
Issues around procurement of textbooks, inaccuracies and glitches by publishers had a huge impact on teaching and learning under the new curricular over the past two years. This forced the government to postpone this year’s planned examinations under the new curriculum.
The government justifies its in-house publishing initiative as aimed at salvaging the process, but experts questioned this saying it could kill the local publishing industry and is still bound to face issues.
Lack of experience
Some experts question the quality of these materials on the basis that the educationists — mainly teachers and REB employees — are qualified education personnel, but lack experience in production and publishing which should be a scientific process.
“REB should focus on their core activity of curriculum development and textbook evaluation. Otherwise, with in-house publishing REB will write the book, edit it and also evaluate and approve it. Who will be accountable for any errors or mistakes in the books?” a source said, citing mistakes and shallow content in some of books in the first bunch produced through the in-house process.
Publishers describe issues cited in the previous textbook supply and distribution process as being linked to REB’s inefficiencies and poor contract management with cases of unrealistic timelines and cumbersome approval processes, which saw a number of firms fail to deliver, or deliver poor quality materials.
However, the Rwanda Education Board dismissed publishers’ concerns saying that the institution was confident of the success its in-house publishing process and would help improve the quality of education.
“We want to reduce overreliance on suppliers for textbooks given the copyright issues in case we need to change anything in terms of content or need to replace textbooks,” said REB director-general Ndayambaje Irénée.
The country has more than 20 local publishing firms. A poor reading culture has been negatively impacting on their business as the only demand has been for textbooks. A number of local publishing firms have been calling for policies and incentives to boost their capacity.