See: List of High Schools in Zimbabwe and Contact Numbers
Update at 3:45PM: The website is reportedly coming back momentarily for some users. If you’re trying to access the website, it may be helpful for you to keep hitting the refresh button. This is a sign that the website is being overwhelmed by a high number of visitors attempting to access it at the same time.
The Ministry of Education website to enable parents to apply for their children’s Form 1 boarding places is down. According to infromation from various parents, the website has been down for the better part of the day today.
Parents with children looking to get into Form 1 boarding school have been left panicked and stranded after trying to access www.empa.co.zw and finding that the website will not load at all. The applications window opened yesterday and is closing tomorrow.
It is not clear yet why the website is down but it could be anything from the site itself being faulty technically, to it being overwhelmed by a huge number of parents accessing it at the same time.
The deadline for applications is tomorrow. With so much downtime today, the ministry may be force to extend the deadline for online applications.
Techzim wrote yesterday that the online school enrolment system that Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Education developed as a way of automating the application process for securing boarding places for Form 1.
The system, gather details of applicants and match them to available schools based on three choices, is now live. The Ministry has started shared the details of the system and how to use it yesterday in the newspapers.
Some parents have said however that they were able to make their applications easily on the website before it went down. Some were only able to get some applications in but not all 3 applications that parents need to make in case their first school choice is not successful.
Techzim has said parents contacted them frantically trying to establish the source of the problem, with most of them suspecting that it was their internet connections that were faulty.
Website problems aside, parents have also complained that there was not enough notice from the Ministry of Education on the workings of the new system.
Read More on: Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education
Read More on: Electronic Ministry Application Platform (EMAP) (includes contact numbers)