BY NOKUTHABA DLAMINI
A Victoria Falls school saw at least 600 students dropping out at the height of the Covid-19 outbreak as hundreds of parents lost their sources of income with some being forced to relocate, it has been revealed.
Mosi-Oa-Tunya High School headmaster Roland Sibanda made the revelations at a recent ceremony to handover the Secretary’s Merit Award to the school.
Victoria Falls, the country’s major tourist resort, was hit hard by the Covid-19 outbreak as international lockdowns and local restrictions paralysed the tourism industry.
“The enrolment has been steadily increasing over the years, but however, the school has been adversely affected by the raging scourge of Covid-19 which resulted in the closure of major tourism companies,” Sibanda said at the function that was delayed since 2017 due to various reasons.
“By implication, most parents relocated to places like Hwange to search for greener pastures and consequently our enrolment has dropped from 1 700 to 1140 with 545 males and 595 females.”
The school is one of the best performing in Hwange district with 60 percent of students enrolled for Form 5 doing sciences.
Hundreds of people that were employed in the tourism sector in the resort city lost their jobs and are struggling for survival.
A 2020 study by We Are Victoria Falls, a local hospitality industry initiative, said the Covid-19 pandemic had affected about 94 percent of the people employed in the sector.
It said some workers’ contracts were permanently terminated while others were put on unpaid leave while some were placed on temporary contracts.
According to a recent report by the United Nation’s Children Fund (Unicef) and Friedrich Naumann Foundation, an estimated 1 million school children in the country have dropped out of school because of Covid-19.
Unicef described Covid-19 as “a pandemic that has created a shadow crisis for children”.
It said, for some, apart from dropping out, many had found themselves exposed to abuse and violence, isolation, increased anxiety, child labour and forced marriages as parents have been struggling to meet their needs.
“Many parents have been unable to continue with their employment while balancing their children’s needs,” Unicef said in the September report.
“Some have lost their jobs entirely, pushing their families into poverty and creating a deeper economic crisis.”
While remote learning has been a lifeline for millions of school children, access to the technology and the quality of the curriculum have been uneven, even within communities and school districts, it added.
Unicef urged the government to implement an inclusive learning policy framework to address the crisis.