Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education has issued contracts to print high school textbooks to Indian printers. The 5.9 million US dollar contract to reprint textbooks, including teachers’ guides, for five subjects went to Repro Printers and Pitambra Books.
Nineteen international printers had responded to the invitation put out by the Ministry of Education to reprint biology, civic, chemistry, ethics, mathematics and physics.
The bidding international printers passed a technical evaluation which assessed their capacity and ability to supply the books with the proper weight of paper and specified cover page.
Repro put in a bid for all the textbooks except for ethics and civics and won with the lowest bid of 2.4 million US dollars to reprint the biology and physics textbooks.Pitambra won the bid for the remaining subjects at a total cost of 3.5 million US dollars.
The two companies will print 5 million books expected to arrive in June of this year according to ministry officials. The printers will deliver the textbooks to 31 locations across Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian government has been outsourcing the printing of text books to foreign printers since 2009 after the authorities decided that domestic printers lacked the capacity to do the job.
The project is part of the Ministry of Education’s General Education Quality Improvement Package supported by a 417 million dollar grant from the World Bank, and the governments of Finland, UK and Italy.
The Ministry has spent a total of 150 million US dollars on curriculum development funded by the Ethiopian government and the World bank Group.
Source: Addis Fortune
