“The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.” These were the words of a British statesman, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, who was a two-time prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Arguably, the capacity to combine the two ways of thinking: creative and critical thinking equips one to produce robust actions. Whilst creative thinking looks at problems or situations from a fresh perspective to conceive of something novel or unusual, the latter looks at ideas by discerning and deciding how realistic they actually are.
The pair, without any doubt, could be said to be yielding positive results in the education sector through the School-Based Management Committee (SBMC) template conceived and massively supported by UNICEF-Nigeria, in collaboration with the Federal Government and the Department for International Development (DFID), the official development agency of United Kingdom’s government managing aids for the poor, developing nations.
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Imperatively, SBMC is a unique template which brings communities, parents, non-parents, teachers, artisans, school children and governments under one umbrella for synergy towards addressing challenges in the basic education sector, particularly funding, infrastructure and service delivery rather than waiting solely on the government.
By this, communities automatically become stakeholders and actively participate in management of public schools in their environments in partnership with government for judicious and timely cogent actions.
Its exceptional feature is that the communities freely participate as stakeholders in managing, identifying projects of premium significance in schools in their neighbourhood and presenting budget to government for funding where their treasury is incapable of meeting the bills, unlike the preceding pattern where governments executeed projects uniformly without carrying the grassroots along, let alone considering impacts and peculiarities.
Thus, this ultimately gives powers back to the people; communities become part of the management of schools in their respective environments in partnership with government.
The remarkable results compellingly necessitated this ‘expo’ for other states, perhaps still reluctant to take the SBMC seriously. Evidently, few states that accorded the robust attention it deserves, particularly Kano, are making significant impacts.
For example, through the interventionist mechanism, a primary school presently owns a car-wash centre, flower-garden and other business ventures put in place by SBMC and prudently managed for revenue generation for projects in the school.
Through it, school uniforms are periodically acquired for pupils. It therefore implies that the era of collapsed classrooms or lack of necessities in schools is gone, unlike in the past when minor maintenance works like roof leakages were ignored until they deteriorated to complete collapse.
Apart from SBMC’s boost on infrastructure development in the schools, various groups in the communities that make up the SBMC, including artisans, mothers, make their respective valuable contributions accordingly.
Vocational skills like sewing, beads-making and others have been incorporated into the school curriculum which equips pupils for productivity. Visibly, essential projects including, boreholes, chairs, landscaping of school compound, were also impressively put in place by the SBMC scheme.
In a nutshell, SBMCs are established by governments as essential link between schools and communities as they serve in providing good governance and assist schools with basic needs and support for improvement of teaching and learning environment, rather than abandoning all responsibilities to the governments.
Carl Umegboro
carlumegboro.com
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