The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF has called for more investments in Nigeria’s primary schools saying 45-50 percent of the nation’s education budget should be spent on primary education.
The Chief Education, UNICEF Nigeria, Saadhna Soobrayan made the call on Wednesday in Abuja during a seminar on foundational literacy and Numeracy in Nigeria.
According to Saadhna, more investment is still needed in the primary school sub-sector adding that the country still faces the challenge of universal enrolment.
“So the first problem on education in Nigeria is spending too little money on education, Nigeria is spending 1.2 percent of it GDP on education, the international benchmark is 4-6 percent and even the available fund is not being spent well.“
She noted that presently 28 percent of Nigeria’s education budget is been spent on higher education “When children in primary school cannot read write and count.
“We need to get the budget right and increase volume of expenditure, the country needs to improve the efficiency of expenditure to primary education,“ Saadhna added.
Foundational Literacy and Numeracy
Evaluating learning interventions deployed by UNICEF in Northern Nigeria in the last five years, Saadhna disclosed that the UN agency discovered the need to train the teachers and make available instructional materials to fully scale up programs such as Reading and Numeracy Activity (RANA), Early grade reading (the USAID model) and Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL).
“In the last five years, UNICEF has been testing various interventions to solve the learning crisis in Nigeria.”
Next Five Years Task
She added that the task for the next five years is to scale up the successful interventions across Nigeria.
“We have subjected these pilot programmes to independent assessment, evaluation and they have proven to be effective to improve Literacy and numeracy rate
“We really should aim in the next five years to see a massive improvement in literacy and numeracy skills and what we need to achieve this are political will, human and financial resources, all of these are already in the system we only need to be redirected to the systems that really work like the ones we have tested.“
Nigerian Government Response
The Director, Basic Education of the Federal Ministry of Education, Dr Folake Davies, said the Nigerian government applauds the initiatives and would be willing to domesticate the programs following the displayed evidence in the Northern part of the country.
According to Dr Davies, the Federal government is currently developing an appropriate policy framework to guide the practitioners, support Foundational literacy and Numeracy practice across the country.
She added that the government is putting in place reviewed national policy on mother tongue for use in primary schools to
“Most of these programmes are done in the language of the immediate environment and to replicate in other parts of the country we also need to have them in language that children understand and the Federal Government is putting in place reviewed national policy on mother tongue for use in primary schools and to this, teachers are being trained curriculum is been reviewed to take care of this language policy.
“When we have this done properly then we will be able to deploy and replicate these approaches we have in northern Nigeria, to have the full benefit of improving learning outcomes at the foundational level and improve numeracy and literacy accuracy and to this end teachers are being trained curriculum is been reviewed to take care of this language policy putting in place reviewed national policy on mother tongue for use in primary schools and to this, teachers are being trained curriculum is been reviewed to take care of this language policy.“
At the seminar, UNICEF, USAID and its partners convened a knowledge-sharing meeting on scaling Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in Nigeria.
The aim of the meeting was to promote awareness of FLN models and lessons from the implementation of foundational learning programmes in Northern Nigeria.
PIAK
