Fixing Education….Part 1
Education, or specifically Government funded education has failed in Nigeria. We have a quantity and a quality problem. On every indicator, teacher quality, student enrollments, examination pass rates, infrastructure in schools, safety in school etc, Nigeria public education scores very poorly.
What went wrong? First some history…
in 1950s the McPherson Constitution of 1951 made education a regional matter. Each of the Regions; -Eastern Region, Western Region, and Northern Region- henceforth was free to enact laws and make polices on education.
On January 17, 1955, the Government of Western Region launched the six-year free primary education scheme with 392,859 children in 6,274 schools participating.
In 1957 the Eastern Regional Government launched a free, universal primary education for the first two years. Pupil enrollment was 1,209,167 in 1957.
Lagos, a federal territory, started universal primary education in 1957 with 50,182 pupils in 96 schools participating.
The Northern Regional Government did not initiate a commensurate program of universal primary education.
Why did the Northern Regional Government not pass a law on Universal Primary Education? I am sure there was a valid reason, but history suggests not passing a universal primary education program was a mistake by the Northern Nigerian Government.
The effects of this mistake is very apparent today… Nigeria in 2013 was recorded as having the highest number of children out of school in the world, specifically 10m Nigerian children are out of school. to put that number in perspective, Nigeria has more kids out of school that the entire population of Sweden.
Let’s get specific UNICEF estimates 40% of Nigerian children aged 6-11 do not attend any primary school with the Northern region recording the lowest school attendance rate in the country, particularly for girls. Extractions from the 2008 Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data shows the sub-national region with the highest percentage of children out of school is North East (53%). (South East has the lowest.)
So to summarize the problem, Nigerian kids don’t go to school, and the bulk of these kids are in the North East…. (it’s no coincidence the Boko Haram Insurgency erupted in the North East)
To fix this, we have to refocus on providing the very basic skills to the most number of Nigerians to ensure we have a base to build on.
So to me, we have two big huge targets,
A. Get 10m kids not in school, educated
B. Fund Education, to educate the kids in school
In that order.
So the clear emergency is 10m kids, illiterate, not in school. Can we educate 10 km kids? In one year? Forget about the money, is this possible logistically to do this? Yes.
Cuba had a program that basically mobilized 1m Cubans, and in one year educated 707,212 illiterate Cubans.
Fidel Castro declared a war on illiteracy, he made 1961 a year of education, Cuba organized a volunteer army of teenagers, retirees, professional teachers, basically anyone that was literate and trained them as alfabetizador, or “literacy teachers” for two weeks then deployed them to the rural areas to build schools and teach new teachers but most importantly teach illiterate villagers how to read and write.
What was achieved was a staggering success, before the program, Literacy rate in Cuba was 76%, after the program national literacy rate was 96%…amazing.
This they achieved by basically using a volunteer army of teenagers….at basically no cost, these volunteers ate and slept in villages at great personal sacrifice. … google it, it’s an amazing success, (literacy level in Cuba today is 100%)
Lagos State had a smaller program called EKO Lagos Teachers scheme where they also got white collar non teachers to go teach life skills to kids in primary and secondary schools. Different scale. Different concept but similar idea. I know this administration plans to employ 500,000 new teachers, good start, but we need much more, and a greater scope and clearer focus…this is after all an emergency.
We know where these out of school kids are, we have a fair estimation of their numbers, we need a similar scheme like the Cubans.
A practical example can be to deploy 50% of the total NYSC next year 2017, with the military and an army of retirees as teachers posted with special emphasis to the post NE states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, with a target to eliminate illiteracy in 12 months.
The Nigerian Army Corp of Engineers can be mandated to build schools, we can easily get donor funds to rebuild schools in the NE, the US alone says development assistance to Nigeria this year can be $800m, we can invest that exclusively in building schools in the North East….
It’s possible…. it’s a first start, even if we achieve just 20% success that’s 2m kids educated…Two Million
So we have addressed (A) which is getting 10m kids not into school by part (B) next week we address funding education, to educate the kids in school.
…. This is clearly our problem, and we can solve it
