Instead of the promised 300 schools – 135, and instead of 500 kindergartens – 306. Pashinya

In 2021, Pashinyan unveiled to the public one of the most touted initiatives of his government’s five-year plan: to build, overhaul or renovate by 2026 at least 300 schools and 500 kindergartens and preschools. This program was presented as a key component of the educational revolution, a symbol of “New Armenia” and should become one of the main indicators of the government’s effectiveness.

5 years have passed. There are only a few weeks left until the end of this government’s mandate, and today it is already possible to assess based on clear data that this promise, among others, has not been fulfilled.

During 2023-2026, Pashinyan and the Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports Zhanna Andreasyan repeatedly announced in their public speeches that the implementation of the program is going well and according to the schedule. However, the reality is completely different.

According to the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports, only 135 of the planned 300 schools have been completed. In other words, more than half of the promised schools, 165, are still not ready by the end of the government’s activities.

In the case of kindergartens, only 306 of the planned 500 have been completed, and 194 remain unfinished.

It turns out that within 5 years, the school construction project was implemented by only 45%, and the kindergarten construction project by 61%. And this is when it was about one of the most important and most advertised programs of the government, which has also become one of the key propaganda theses in this pre-election period.

By the way, the government itself has indirectly accepted its own failure by planning the completion of the construction/repair works of many schools and kindergartens either before the end of 2026 or in 2027. And here a logical question arises. if the program was planned for 2021-2026, why should a significant part of it be completed? after the end of the activity of the given government, when a new government will be formed with its new program and priorities, and, why not, by another political force. In other words, the current government was actually not able to fulfill its pre-election and program commitments, and transferred their implementation to the future.

Moreover, the problem is not only in quantity. It is more remarkable what volume and quality of work was carried out in the case of the mentioned schools and kindergartens. The point is that, probably with the aim of propaganda and misleading the public, both Pashinyan and the responsible department have been drumming up the thesis “we are building a school” for years in the context of this project. However, representatives of the KP government and KP deputies professionally avoid the question of how many of these schools and kindergartens are actually built from scratch, so to speak.

Out of 135 completed schools, only 42 are newly built. The remaining 93 have been reconstructed, overhauled or repaired. The same picture is in the case of kindergartens. out of 306 completed objects, only 55 are newly built.

The most complex and most voluminous part of the construction of new facilities, namely: 146 of the 165 schools not yet completed and  Construction of 115 kindergartens fell to at the end of 2026 and in 2027.

In other words, the government was able to carry out the repair works relatively quickly, but it failed the most complex and the most important, the construction of new educational infrastructures.

A very logical and undesirable question for the authorities arises. if the government was able to build only 42 schools and 55 kindergartens within 5 years, then how is it going to complete a much larger number of objects in a few months, which entail much more extensive construction work?

In fact, the failure of the “300 schools, 500 kindergartens” program is not a surprise discovery. In recent years, the performance reports of the state budget and Yerevan city budget, medium-term expenditure plans and other official documents have regularly recorded the low performance of school construction and kindergarten construction and major repair projects. In various periods, the expenses of the “Establishment, construction, improvement of public educational and pre-school institutions” project were under-executed by tens of billions of drams, and in some cases even less than a third of the planned expenses were implemented. And both experts and opposition politicians are vocal about it. However, the government chose to ignore those alarms.

The program “300 schools, 500 kindergartens” should have become a symbol of the success of Nikol Pashinyan’s administration, but instead it became a formula that best describes the management style of this government: high bar, loud announcements, large-scale propaganda and in the end, a long list of unfulfilled promises. It would be more honest to RA citizens to change the name of that program to “135 schools, 306 kindergartens”.

And we are not talking about the fact that information is repeatedly published about the defects, low-quality works and design problems recorded during the construction of schools and kindergartens. It is also needless to say that, in rare cases, the blame for deviations from the deadline and delays is always placed on a third party, but never on the government.

If the “300 schools, 500 kindergartens” program was really “going quite well”, why is Armenia still waiting for the promised 165 schools and 194 kindergartens in 2026?

The efficiency of the state administration is evaluated not by the promises made, but by their fulfillment. When one of the most important targets set by the government is not met within 5 years, and its implementation is actually postponed after the end of the project, it is no longer a construction or organizational problem, but a question of political responsibility.

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