Jamaica: Government awards $430-m contract for textbooks Education

The Ministry of Education’s National Textbook Loan Scheme for 2014/2015 gets an addition of $430 million contract approved on Monday for the procurement and distribution of textbooks for students.

The local companies bags the award Kingston Bookshop Limited ($233,615,387), Carlong Publishers (Caribbean) Limited ($94,000,878), and Book Wizard Limited ($102,374,500).

The recent contract will be an addition to the Ministry of Education’s existing stock that is loaned to students in grades seven to eleven and are expected to be distributed to schools in the latter part of August. The earlier approval by the cabinet for the procurement of books for students in grades one to six, which are currently being distributed to primary schools ahead of the start of the new school year. The Ministry of Education will spend nearly $1 billion on the procurement of textbooks, this financial year.

New copies of textbooks will be allotted by schools after the rotation of five-year and seven-year. Local providers will assist in the repair works of textbooks during these periods according to the Ministry of Education. The Minister of Education Ronald Thwaites, himself conducted a meeting with the parents and students to ensure that textbooks on loan are handled with care and even requested grade eleven students to return books loaned to them.

There has been a remarkable cut down in expenditure on textbook orders for the secondary level programme, It moved down from $638 million in 2010/2011 to a low of $430 million in the current financial year. This reduction is a result of an islandwide audit of the National Textbook Loan Scheme in February 2010. It was traced that, some schools were ordering excess quantities of textbooks. Recovering the excess textbooks and redistributing them to schools islandwide was in process by the ministry.