Nigeria

8.2m Kids Lack Access to Education

THE worsening socio-economic condition of the average citizen in the country has been highlighted with statistics from the office of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) indicating that 8.2 million children of school age do not have adequate access to education.

This figure represents children who were enrolled in school but dropped out due to diverse circumstances and those who were never enrolled but are still in school.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on MDG, Dr. Precious Gbeneol, gave the figure yesterday in Abuja at the second National Conference on Education organised by the Centre for Economic and Leadership Development (CELD). She stated that Nigeria had taken a major step forward in its target of universal access to basic schooling by 2015.

“However, there exist significant gaps in the different parts of the country as state primary completion rates range from two to 99 per cent. Low completion rates reflect poor learning environments and point at the urgent need to raise teaching standards”, she noted.
Gheneol posited that to scale up the achievement of universal primary and universal junior secondary, there was an urgent need to increase finance, train the teachers, review the curriculum, manage and supervise the school, among others.

The Executive Director (CELD), Mrs. Furo Giami, in her welcome address, lamented that students dropped out of school in their first year of education due to unequal provision of education and abject poverty, saying that delivering education-for-all was achievable in the country.

Quoting from a report by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) that Nigeria had more children out of school than any other country in the world, Giami submitted that Nigerian leaders at all levels must make funding for education a priority in order to meet the MDG by 2015.

She said: “If scientists can genetically modify food and NASA can send missions to Mars, politicians must be able to find the resources to send millions of children to school and change the prospects of a generation of children. You and I can sponsor one child’s education, then, together we can change the prospects of a generation of children, who would not have naturally lived their dreams, if not for your kind gestures”.
The high-point of the event was the presentation of cheques of N20,000 each to 11 students from government secondary schools in the Federal Capital Territory

Original source from The Guardian