Stakeholders harp on adequate investment in early childhood education

Stakeholders in the education sector have identified the importance of investing in the early education of children as a way of building a solid foundation for national development.

Participants at the April edition of EdTech Mondays, a monthly educative forum being organised by the Mastercard Foundation in conjunction with Co-Creation Hub, gave this position.

The event, which was held virtually and with  ‘Technology for Education: Is it never too early,’ as its theme,  featured James Stuart, the co-founder of Onebillion; Victoria Ibiwoye, the founder of One African Child, and Dr Oluwaseun Lawal, a teacher in Oyo State, as panellists.

One of them, Mrs Victoria Ibiwoye said that though the government had made education tuition free at the elementary level, there was a huge number of out-of-school children in the country.

She pointed out that even at that, technology had redefined education across levels, hence the need to invest in children education right from the pre-primary level.

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She also harped on the need to provide education to vulnerable children such as those in the internally-displaced camps according to their peculiarities and needs rather than as if in the  normal system.

In his own contribution, James Stuart, admitted that there were lots of factors hindering the delivery of quality early childhood education in Nigeria, listing poor supervision and control, inadequate funding, rejection of mother’s tongue, lack of technology tools, as some of them.

He stressed the need to address the situation by changing the narratives for a better tomorrow.

A teacher in Oyo State, Dr Oluwaseun Lawal, in her contribution, added that “most of the time, the foundation determines how the structure would be – solid or weak.

“So, there is a need to have quality education from  the foundational level so as to build it up to the tertiary level,” she stressed.