During the House of Representatives' 2022 budget deliberations on Tuesday, Sept. 14, the Department of Education (DepEd) told the congress that it needs P37 billion to provide all public school teachers across the country with laptops and guarantee data connectivity as the government continues to implement distance learning system due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
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Undersecretary Alain Pascua told the lawmakers that the Department lacks funds to provide laptops and internet connection to all teachers.
We have a direction, we have a framework. In fact, we know how much funds we need. For example, if we will be providing all teachers with the needed laptops considering the existence of laptops that we have now, we still need P33 billion to provide everybody with laptops,
he said.
He also said that an additional 4 billion is needed for data connectivity for the next 12 months.
We have already made several programs, but always at the end of the day, it’s always the amount of funds needed for these programs that we are obviously lacking at this time,” he added.
In 2019, Pascua said the Department bought 211,000 units of laptops and were already distributed to teachers. A total of 36,676 laptops which were bought in 2020 are currently being delivered.
Meanwhile, for this year, a total of 65,683 laptops are still being procured apart from the 40,000 units that were purchased under Bayanihan 2.
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