Obaseki approves N951m for education in oil-producing areas

HEEDING the cry of neglect by oil and gas producing communities in Edo State, Governor Godwin Obaseki has approved the roll-out of Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation (Edo-BEST) programme in Ikpoba-Okha, Ovia North-East and Orhionmwon local government areas.

The Special Adviser on Communication and Strategy to Obaseki, Mr. Crusoe Osagie, who disclosed this  in Benin on Monday, explained that the roll-out programme was to be funded by the Edo State Oil and Gas Producing Areas Development Commission (EDSOGPADEC), with the sum of N951,594,424 million to cover the cost of providing top-of-the-range basic education for 62,074 children in all primary schools in the three local councils.

Osagie said that the beneficiaries included the initial 11,530 children who benefited from the pilot phase and the 50, 544 pupils, who will come on onboard in the full roll-out.

He said that the three local councils were selected by Edo State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) to benefit fully from the programme, after a pilot of the Edo-BEST programme involving 11,530 pupils from the local councils.

The Edo-BEST programme is an initiative of the current administration to develop a highly-skilled teaching workforce by training, supporting and motivating  teachers to succeed in the classroom of tomorrow; enhance the basic education curriculum thereby empowering school children to compete effectively in their studies.

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The governor said: “The programme will leapfrog the basic education delivery systems by leveraging technology across all the value chain of education provision and leveraging technology to gather and utilise accurate and timely data to drive policy and planning decisions. It will also invest in strengthening the institutions that support the delivery of basic education in Edo State.”

Under the programme, every teacher receives tablets loaded with digital lesson plans for every lesson needed for each day while head teachers are given smart phones and provided with monthly data to enable them use the software in the smart phone to register all children and take attendance and manage teacher performance in each classroom every day.

In the pilot phase of the programme in which 11,530 students from the three local government areas benefited, 8,993 of them were from Ikpoba-Okha, 1,214 from Orhionmwon and 1,323 from Ovia North East.

For the roll-out phase, 50, 544 children are expected to benefit, comprising 23,329 from IkpobaOkha; 13, 592 from Orhionmwon and 13,623 from Ovia North East Local Government Areas.

The governor added, “the total cost of textbooks for pupils and teachers’ access to all technology, initial support for each school including head teacher data and customer care information technology support services as well as all teachers training and retraining, access to all digital platform and content support is estimated at 14,600 per child per year.”