The Ministry of Education is embarking on a project to provide 20,000 teachers with BlackBerry smartphones.

This is being done in conjunction with the Canadian company, Research in Motion, which introduced BlackBerry phones to the mobile market in 2009.

The aim of the project is to make it easier for teachers to communicate with their colleagues, as well as with officials from the education ministry.

This will be facilitated by a closed user group service whereby calls between the teaching population and ministry will be free of cost.

Members of the group will also benefit from instant messaging service to other smartphone users.

The phones will also have a security feature that will allow for emergency calls to the police and fire department to be made automatically when necessary.

The Ministry also said the possibility of having teachers use the mobile devices to input academic data into its database management system is also being considered.