Edem Ossai is a lawyer, a girl-child advocate and the founder of Mentoring Assistance for Youths and Entrepreneurs Initiative (MAYEIN). An Echidna Global Scholar, Obama Scholar, and Mandela Washington Fellow, her work centres on basic education policies, girls’ empowerment and community service. In this interview by KINGSLEY ALUMONA, she speaks about her educational work during crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
YOU have been active in the education policy space for almost a decade now. How has the journey been so far?
It has been rigorous and challenging. At the same time, there has been success recorded in the lives of schoolchildren through our direct programmes. This also includes policy recommendations to education ministries, including my most recent policy brief on the Oyo State school on air programme initiated during the COVID-19 school closures.
Your major education and humanitarian works are carried out through your NGO, Mentoring Assistance for Youths and Entrepreneurs Initiative (MAYEIN). Tell us about the NGO and your job description there?
MAYEIN focuses on improving equity in education (which also includes entrepreneurship, employability and civic education) through the aspects of qualitative learning outcomes and improving access for girls. Under these pillars, we have designed formal literacy as well as digital literacy interventions in form of school- and community-based mobile libraries, ‘The Oyo e-Literacy Project’, which delivers practical computer lessons to secondary school children. We have also led different campaigns and programmatic strategies such as projects ‘I stand with Malala’, ‘Do it 4 Her’ and ‘Girls Without Borders’ aimed at reducing secondary school drop-out rates amongst schoolgirls. So far, we have impacted more than 7000 schoolchildren and youths in south-west Nigeria and over 5000 adolescent girls in Northern Nigeria through our programmes.
This is why in 2021 the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) awarded us Special Consultative Status at its meetings, including the UN General Assembly. I am proud to be the Founder and Executive Director of MAYEIN.
Your recent work has been on education in emergency (EiE) and school on air (SOA) research/policies. Briefly tell us what these two terms mean.
Education in Emergency (EiE) refers to strategies which ensure that in times of emergencies and crises, affected populations of young people can safely access quality programmes that are relevant to their learning needs, whilst also ensuring that children who face higher risks, such as unwanted pregnancies, violence, sexual assault, and substance abuse receive physical and social protection. It basically means programmes which ensure that schoolchildren can continue to learn in the safest way possible and also educational content that is relevant to their different needs during crises.
School on Air is an example of such a programme. It refers to the Learn at Home Programme (LHP) launched by the Oyo State government during the COVID-19-induced school closures in 2020. Through the SOA programme, from April to December 2020, the Oyo State Ministry of Education, in collaboration with the Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State (BCOS), transmitted TV and radio broadcasts for secondary school students.
What motivated you to carry out these research works? And did you get sponsorship/partnership while carrying out the research?
During my childhood, I experienced a form of crisis and emergency. It was the death of my father and primary income provider. That personal experience taught me that economic factors typically interact with gender norms and biases in society to produce different challenges and limitations for boys and girls, especially in the aspect of continuing their education.
Crises appear in myriad forms, but we must be sensitive to how they affect schoolchildren differently; otherwise, we will design responses and believe we have protected their learning not realising that several vulnerable schoolchildren populations have fallen through the cracks.
You conducted the EiE and SOA research as a 2021 Echidna Global Scholar. Tell us about the Echidna Fellowship and the benefits of being its scholar.
The Echidna Global Scholars programme is organised by the Centre for Universal Education at Brookings Institution in Washington DC, USA. The programme is focused on global girls’ education research. It is for scholar-practitioners who not only use the instrument of evidence-based research but are also active on the field of development practice, implementing evidence-based solutions to issues and barriers to girls’ education.
As an Echidna Global Scholar, I have been able to contribute to the global discourse on girls’ education and to develop a policy brief on gender responsive Education in Emergencies in Nigeria. I have also sharpened my research skills and expanded my network.
At the Brookings Institution, you participated in a virtual workshop tagged: ‘Girls’ education research and policy symposium: Protecting rights and futures in times of crisis’. What was the major highlight of the panel?
One major highlight was that continuing to leave girls behind in education, or poorly safeguarding their learning in times of crisis, is simply contrary to the enlightened goal of sustainable development in any country, including Nigeria. Another key highlight was that, as the world embraces new forms of technology for the delivery of learning outcomes, there is a new responsibility on education planners to adapt to digital curricula and lessons, and to train teachers in new pedagogies.
One of the panellists in the virtual workshop was the Lagos State Commissioner for Education, Mrs Folasade Adefisayo. What are the major comments the commissioner made as regard your research findings?
She agreed that Lagos State recorded differences in the participation of schoolboys and girls in their Education in Emergency response, and so it is absolutely necessary to adopt gender-responsive approaches into state education planning. She promised to use the recommendations in the policy paper to guide her ministry’s next-level plans and systems-strengthening focus.
How do you think your EiE and SOA findings could change the narrative of the Nigerian basic education system?
My report highlights the significant difficulties that girls in Oyo State had in participating in the School on Air programme during the COVID-19 pandemic, among them lack of significant control of their time, limited access to technology, inhibitive instructional modes, and cultural gender bias. I have proposed actionable recommendations for state education planners and decision makers to mitigate these challenges for secondary schoolgirls in Oyo State, and indeed for girls across Nigeria, who struggle to learn effectively from radio- and television-based remote education.
Do you have any interest in submitting your EiE and SOA work to the Oyo State or Nigerian government? If you have done so, how did they welcome it?
I invited the Commissioner for Education to the global symposium where I presented my findings and I have also shared the policy paper to him via his official email channels. So far, there has been no response from the Oyo State Ministry of Education. I am hoping to organise a physical knowledge dissemination session on the paper when I arrive in a few weeks and invite officials from the ministry as participants. My hope is that they will view the paper as a means of strengthening the School on Air initiative.
You are very active when it comes to Oyo State basic education and advocacy. How would you rate Governor Seyi Makinde’s education policies in the state?
The present administration announced its goal to return over 400,000 out-of-school children back to school and they have been working to achieve this by expanding classrooms, hiring more teachers and increasing the state budgetary allocation to education. This is highly commendable. However, I want to point out that emergencies and crises have a tendency to reverse decades of progress in school participation and improved learning outcomes for schoolchildren, especially for girls. Education planners in Oyo State need to incorporate a gender lens.
During my research, one official in the Oyo State Ministry of Education said to me: “The reason we are not always that sensitive about gender here is that education is our legacy in the southwest. So whether you give birth to a male child or a female child, you will be very sure you must send him or her to school, at least up to university. So, we don’t put a gender clause into most of our policies because that is the way it plays out naturally. . . .”
This mindset demonstrates a common pitfall of government planners. The result is that the most marginalised school populations are not considered during crises.
How would you advice states and the federal government on the prioritisation of girl-child education in the country?
In times of emergency, barriers to the education of girls are compounded. Schools are often one of the major institutional casualties of complex disasters, emergencies, or epidemics constantly disrupting girls’ schooling. At the start of 2020, for example, 935 schools in northeast Nigeria were closed as a result of conflict, and girls have continued to suffer from the ever-worsening insecurity and violence across the country.
It is therefore not enough for state and federal governments to simply launch Learn at Home Programmes (LHP). Rather government and education stakeholders need to establish permanent systems for EiE planning, policy, design, and implementation that place girls — and girls’ voices — at the centre. They must also shift their focus from delivery of programmes to improving learning outcomes. Involving communities is also critical to promoting parental support and to ensuring that the most vulnerable children have access to EiE interventions, particularly in remote and in marginalised areas.
What three things do you miss about Nigeria while in the United States?
Afang soup and yellow garri (eba), my office and the neighbourly culture.
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