UBE: New Rivers board promises to improve education,

The new Board of Rivers State Universal Basic Education (UBE) says it will add more values to the education sub-sector, assuring of a reviewed template for all Heads of schools to check teachers truancy.

The Chairman of the board, Venerable Francis Aka, made the assertion in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Port Harcourt.

He said he would ensure that the sub-sector drives its programme in line with the state government’s new development visions.

“As chairman of the state UBE reconstituted last week by the state government, to us, it’s an opportunity to serve and I’m indeed grateful to God for being part of development in the state, especially in the education sub-sector.

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“With God on our side, we promise to drive education in the light of the new vision of the governor with a view to achieving positive school change in a very inclusive manner.

“We shall place great emphasis on quality assurance in project delivery, monitoring and evaluation of curriculum activities in all schools in the state.

“Rivers state was originally rated as one of the most disadvantaged in terms of school enrollments as revealed by the World Bank and UNICEF prisms.

“We were also captured by the same evaluation as one of the states with the highest number of out-of-school children,” he said.

Aka said that his predecessor did work round the clock trying to change the unpleasant record through the establishment of schools in most communities in Khana, Etche, Emuohua and even in Obio/Akpor local government areas in some communities where there were no schools.

“This board will build more on that initiative, we will ensure quality basic education service delivery, we will also ensure capacity building/training for our teachers.

“As we speak, the board is already driving the `teachers professional development programme’ which is a direct intervention project of the Universal Basic Education Commission Abuja.

“We are top on the raider of SUBEBS which are the programme initiator; this program has been going on for 10 weeks with over 1,500 teachers as beneficiaries.

“By this, we look forward to pursuing the vision of the governor by ensuring that our school activities meet the national and global standard,” he said.

The chairman also said that Rivers through the support of the governor had benefited from the World Bank funding.

“Because of the Gov. Nyesom Wike’s commitment to funding educational activities, Rivers has qualified as one of the states to be funded by the World Bank and it has released the first tranche of the money towards funding the out-of-school programme of the state.

“The World Bank has released the first 2 million dollars toward that project, so as soon as the government gives the go-ahead, we will begin to inject that fund into improving our schools to ensure that more children return to school, build and equip more schools where they are lacking.