United States: Raïssa Malu highlights the Congolese government's vision for the education sector

With great skill, Raïssa Malu, Minister of State and Minister of National Education and New Citizenship (EDU-NC), outlined the Suminwa government’s vision for quality education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This took place on Saturday, October 26, in Washington, D.C., during the panel discussion on “The State of Africa 2024 – Education and Skills for Africa’s Future,” organized as part of the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB).

In her remarks, Minister of State Raïssa Malu noted that the Congolese government, through the Ministry of EDU-NC, aims to improve teachers’ socio-professional conditions, strengthen administration, and digitize the education system in order to raise the bar for educational quality. 

“The government must necessarily invest in teachers, who are the key to quality education. So, this involves both improving teachers’ socio-professional conditions—allocating more resources to compensation—and investing in the initial and continuing training of our teachers and inspectors to bring them up to speed, because they, too, are a key pillar upon which the quality of education rests. “And then, we need to make our administration more efficient,” she said, before adding: “We must manage our system based on data and information. And that is the challenge we face, and for me, it is the first step in the investment process. Because, as Minister of National Education, I need to know exactly what the situation is and what the needs are across my entire territory, so that I can redirect the limited resources at our disposal to where they are most needed,” she explained.

Raïssa Malu also highlighted the need for her ministry to strengthen collaborative ties with technical and financial partners, who support these transformations through investment projects in school infrastructure and the pursuit of funding for innovative programs.

“The government is making a tremendous effort to make difficult investment decisions. We need our partners, such as the World Bank, to secure additional resources and channel them toward investments and initiatives that allow us to test things—that’s the beauty of projects. We have pilot projects and can test certain initiatives to see to what extent they can be scaled up, which in turn allows us to plan our investments,” she said. 

The Congolese Minister of Education also emphasized the importance of making schools inclusive and accessible to girls, children with disabilities, and minorities, especially given the free primary education in public schools in the DRC, a program initiated by President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi.

“We’ve had roughly 4 million students who have returned to school or been enrolled, which allows us to expand access. But there are obviously quite a few challenges in terms of quality, and, in any case, we must make our schools more inclusive by ensuring that the entire population—particularly people living with disabilities and minorities—can be integrated. “The first barrier is clearly the financial one; that is what prevents children, particularly girls, from going to school,” she stated.

Raïssa Malu finally emphasized that the actions taken today will be easier to implement tomorrow because, according to the Congolese Minister of Education, the system to be established in the coming days will allow for better guidance.

“The advantage of living in the 21st century is that we have the technology to make investing in and managing our education system much easier and more straightforward,” she concluded. 

Christian BELLA