Ensuring a conductive environment in education encompasses a wide range of areas, which covers ensuring enough teaching and learning materials and furniture included.

Earlier on, we ran a news article in which lack of furniture has forced pupils at Jiboroh Basic Cycle to sit on mats just to follow normal lessons.

It is again in the news that Pasamass Basic Cycle School in the Wuli East District has been faced with inadequate furniture for many years, hindering effective teaching and learning at the school.

The recent shortage of furniture facing this rural community tends to highlight the need for more investment in the country’s education sector.

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal four implemented in 2015 in about 190 countries across the world seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all countries by 2030. If government doesn’t take the urgent steps and right approach, this sustainable development target will be far fetch dream to achieve.

This inadequacy of furniture is seriously affecting education in schools especially in rural Gambia with a high poverty rate. In fact lack of furniture for pupils is an underlying hindrance to the development of writing skills among students.

The constant plight of some rural schools is enough for one to draw conclusion that government is neglecting rural schools and focuses more on town schools.

This school in question with such a huge student population and still lacks basic facilities like furniture is unacceptable.

This nightmare, according to reports, has rendered many pupils including the Early Childhood Development (ECD) class and some pupils of grade three and four respectively to sit on mat to attend sessions.

The worrying part is that it has caused many pupils to drop out from the school.  But what is really hard to comprehend is what the director of Educational Directorate Region Six (6) doing to address this issue, knowing fully these difficulties the school is facing.

Government needs to act fast and come to the aid of this said school. However, support from other departments and philanthropists to ensure effective teaching and learning in the facility is also solicited. Government needs to invest more in Education.