The United Nations Children’s Fund has said poor quality education is pushing 4 million Nigerian children between Primary 1 & JSS3 to drop out annually.
The UNICEF’s Chief of Field Office in North-East Nigeria, Phuong T. Nguyen, disclosed this at the Foundational Literacy and Numeracy seminar in Maiduguri on Wednesday, saying that “one-third of teachers in the North-East are not qualified to teach”.
She noted that currently, there are 1.6 million children out-of-schools in the North-East, while 70 per cent of Nigerian children cannot read with meaning or solve simple math problems.
According to her, UNICEF has now trained over 1,200 teachers to make sure they are qualified to teach in various schools in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states.
“We have done enough assessments to realise that from baseline to the midline, we have really increased over 55 per cent of children are able to read and write in addition to solving simple mathematics problems, with that in mind, we are ready to scale up”.
“We want to use all opportunities working with the state ministry of education, with national and local NGOs, with communities to scale up more widely, we have the materials and we are able to share that widely with any government, with any community, with any NGO to scale up across the border”.
Also speaking, the UNICEF Chief of Education, Saadhna Panday-Soobrayan, said Nigeria has a severe learning crisis, with 3 out of 4 children being unable to read with me or to solve a simple math problem. This not only hobbles children’s opportunity to learn higher-order skills but is also fueling the out-of-school problem through high levels of dropout.
“So if we want to solve the out-of-school problem, we must solve the quality problem in learning.”
“We are convened here today to talk about the scale of the challenge with learning in Northeast Nigeria but, more than that, to share with you some locally grown highly effective models on how to solve the problem.”
“We have put together an exciting programme with a diverse range of speakers so that it will be a full morning but also deeply rewarding.
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