Out of School Children: Nigeria gets strategic response programme

The Accelerated Basic Education Programme, a strategic National Response to the menace of Out Of School Children (OSC) and Youths in Nigeria, has been presented to the Nigerian government.

The European Union sponsored project is to reduce to the barest minimum the OSC as well as return the large number of the overage and the OSC who are disadvantaged, marginalised, affected by crises, disasters and other socio-economic factors in Nigeria.

Support from EU
Presenting the programme in Abuja, EU Partner/Plan International Education Lead Manager, Laban Onisimus, said the EU has expended a total sum of 500,000Euros on the component aspect of the project.

Onisimus who disclosed that the entire project in the North-east will cost the sum of 10mEuros further revealed that for the pilot stage which is presently taking place in Borno State, North-east Nigeria, 54 centers have been set up with 210 teachers already trained on the specialised curriculum and with the projection of 8000 learners.

“With the support from the EU, We are able to pilot this programme in Borno State under the EU response and Recovery resilience project.  For now in Borno State we have 54 centers, we have a target of 8000 learners across the centers. We have 210 teachers that have been trained on this Accelerated learning education and they are currently stepping down the curriculum in the centers”, he said.

Who are OSCs?
Out of School children are those that are between the ages of 10 and 18 who were in school but had their education interrupted and are over-aged to continue schooling from where they stopped and those who have never been to school and are over-aged to start formal education from the foundation class.

“The OSCs will come through the Accelerated Learning Basic Education where a curriculum is designed to compress the basic education stage into three levels. Level one is an equivalent of primary one to three, level two is an equivalent of primary four to six while level three is an equivalent of JSS1 to JSS3. All these are the stages in the basic education component as we have it in Nigeria”, Onisimus added.

Obsolete curriculum
The Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, who was represented by the Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Education, Sonny Echono, received the programme plans and noted that the major source of criticisms to Nigerian government as regards education is obsolete curriculum, adding that the government projects to achieve 90% reduction of illiteracy rate in five years.

He disclosed that the federal government along with other partners on the project have agreed on a consensus to begin a national roll out of the Accelerated Basic Education Programme.

”Mallam Adamu had launched a programme on the review of our education institutions curriculum which began with the Tertiary Institutions. The focus is now on the basic and primary education level”, Echono said.

Reduction of OSCs
The EU Representative, Monte Pantaleoni, disclosed that the EU has included basic education in its education programme in Nigeria to help the country reduce to the barest minimum the Out of School Children figure.

The Executive Secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission, Dr Hamid Bobboyi disclosed that 75% of the OSCs in Nigeria comes from the Northern region of the country.

Bobboyi stressed that the project is strategic in nature and will make impact on phasing out specific challenges in the basic education sector.

Acquisition of reading/writing skills
The Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Education Research and Development Council NERDC, Prof Ismail Junaid, said the focus of the specialised curriculum designed for the Accelerated Basic Education Programme is on acquisition of reading and writing skills.

Junaid also stated that the curriculum was designed to accommodate one Nigerian language and elements of vocational and technical studies.

After the national roll out plan of the programme, the next step is to develop a national implementation guide for the Accelerated Basic Education Programme ABEP, development of a national implementation guide for the programme as well as convene a national roll out for the ABEP

In 2019, the Plan-lead consortium (Plan International, Save the Children and Gender Equality Peace and Development Centre) signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the development of a national curriculum to carter for the educational needs of learners that dropped out of school for one reason or the other.

Nneka Ukachukwu