Our 5 million out-of-school children target for scholarship on course — Private schools

Worried by the huge number of out-of-school children in Nigeria and its socio-economic implications, the private school owners in the country have intensified commitment to enroll no fewer than five million of such children on full scholarship in their various schools nationwide.

National president of the National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools (NAPPS), Yomi Otubela, gave this revelation in an interview with the Nigerian Tribune.

He said that NAPPS member schools which are more than 50, 000 and spread across all the 774 local government councils in the country, have taken up the project and are very committed to it.

He said the modality is that each of the schools will be enrolling as many children of school going age that are not in school as they can in their various schools, particularly within their areas of operations on a yearly basis.

He said they had more than five years’ time-line for the project and many of the member schools had already keyed into it as part of their social responsibilities to the society.

Otubela explained that NAPPS believes that for Nigeria to continue to parade a huge number of out-of-school children as it is doing currently does not augur well for the country and its people.

He said though the responsibility of government is to provide functional and quality education to its citizenry, particularly at the primary and secondary level, it cannot shoulder the responsibility alone, owing to the limited number of schools and economic resources at its disposal.

“That is why the school owners in the private sector felt the need to intervene and offer scholarship to as many out-of-school children as we can across the country,” he said, noting that his schools have many of such children currently in its enrollment.