Map of Western Equatoria State. | Courtesy.

A group of concerned citizens from Western Equatoria’s Greater Mundri is mobilizing fund to support the education sector after nearly all students in the region failed the 2023-2024 South Sudan Certificate of Secondary Education examination.

Western Equatoria registered a record poor performance in the recently released examination results where the results for some schools in the region showed a 100 percent failure.

Charles Sismaya, the Secretary for Resource Mobilization, who initiated the campaign, said the local communities were “devastated” by the poor performance of Western Equatoria candidates in the 2023 high school examination

Charles said they plan to organize coaching sessions in which all candidates from the Greater Mundri will be taught on the new syllabus in the country.

He said the lack of teachers incentive and long delays in salary payment, coupled with unprofessional teaching staff, have jeopardized learning efforts, adding that such situation has forced them to support the students.

“The education system in Great Mundri has collapsed after this shocking result of 2023-2024, where the whole of the counties, Mundri East, Mundri Mavolo and Mundri West failed and only 11% passed,” he said.

“It is really a disaster for the whole county like Mundri East to fail. No single student passed from Mundri East in last year’s examination. As a concerned community, we took an initiative that we need to mobilize the resources and call for education conference to see what the problem is.”

“The challenges are known that teachers are not those who are professionals supposed to teach because of the situation in the country. They have left the profession and joined other professions just to support their families. As a result, we are looking forward to call for the education conference so that we can address these problems.”

Sismaya revealed that their mobilization targets an estimated amount of more than 18 million South Sudan pounds, out of which SSP10 million has already been raised.

He called for the intervention of development partners including UNICEF and UNESCO to support the education sector in the Greater Mundri and the country at large.

In the SSCE results released in August 2024, over 40 percent of the 45,000 candidates failed, according to the results released on Thursday, which showed that only 17 students scored an A plain – a record poor performance that the education ministry attributed to the strict control measures against examination malpractices..

In WES, around 50 students who sat for exams from Nzara and over 20 from Mundri East County public schools have failed while the results for Mundri West, Mvolo and Tambura counties were significantly poor with nearly all candidates failing the exams.

Meanwhile, 217 students failed out of the 572 candidates who sat from public and private schools in the state capital Yambio. In Maridi County, 226 out of total students who sat, 336 failed.