South Sudan’s education system is characterized as a low investment, low capacity, but high demand system. The state building and peace building efforts of the national plans put high demand on the education system to expand fast, reduce inequity, and provide appropriate teaching. But public expenditure is one of the world’s lowest for education.
The basics of the sector administration and management are rudimentary, which started to develop, along with the rest of the civil service in the country, only after the 2005 Peace Agreement. But capacity building efforts of the government have been interrupted by conflict.
The General Education Sector Plan (GESP) 2017-2022, titled 'Planning for Safety, Resilience and Social Cohesion', is an effort to contain this stress on the system, and to give the sector a direction towards stability based on data, evidence and financing outlays.
The first two years of the GESP are framed as a transitional plan that is expected to rapidly increase enrollment along with building new infrastructure, supplying basic teaching and learning materials, regularizing teacher salary and training teachers to cope with the increased enrollment.
The following three years of the GESP are focused on institutionalizing teacher training, school supervision, and expansion of secondary and technical education.
The education system in the country consists of 8,000 primary schools (grades 1-8), 120 secondary schools (grades 9-12) and one university. There is only one functional teacher training college in the country to meet the demand for training teachers.
