‘Nigeria has the highest number children of out of school’
In ranking Nigeria
amongst the worst place for a child to be in 2010, a report by the
Global Campaign for Education (GCE) has stated that Nigeria has more
children out of education than any other country in the world.
The report claims
that an astounding 8.2 million children are not provided with adequate
education in Africa’s most populous country. Comparing the nation’s
wealth with the apparent low standard of education, the report claims
that “the report is made all the more appalling by the fact that
Nigeria is far from poor, by African standards. On paper at least it is
among the continent’s richest countries, the world’s sixth largest
producer of crude oil. But decades of failure to invest in education
have left the basic school system hardly functioning, especially in the
country’s impoverished north.”
For Primary
education, the report claims many students drop out of the school in
their first year of education due to ‘unequal provision of education’
and this it argued, is caused by the lack of political will to address
and arrest the issue. “A lack of political will is a major factor in
the country having the highest number of children out of school in the
world. Gross inequality in the provision of education has led to 8.2
million children out of primary school with many more dropping out
within the first year.”
Poor attendance, imbalanced education
The report
particularly criticised the northern region of the country for an
abysmal amount of children denied good education. “Over half of these
children are in the north of the country, with girls suffering the most
with many receiving just six months of education in their lives. In the
largely Muslim north of Nigeria……….attendance rates are below 50%
at primary school and of those only one in every three pupils is female
(nationwide, the proportion is five boys to four girls)” it noted.
The GCE report is
coming just as the National Education Council of Nigeria (NECO) on
Monday released the 2010 results and over 79% of the students that sat
for the examination failed in English language; the nation’s official
language.
While over 80% of the students failed the entire exam last year.
Nigeria was however
not listed in the list of the bottom 10 countries that are worst for a
child. The countries which are predominantly African nations include
Somalia, Eritrea, Comoros, Ethiopia, Chad, Burkina Faso, Central
African Republic, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Haiti. Tanzania and
Mozambique were however commended for halving the number of children
out of school, while Rwanda is said to have made strong efforts to
ensure that there are enough professionally trained teachers.
The report noted
that delivering education for all is highly achievable and brings other
poverty dividends such as reducing HIV deaths by seven million and
doubling child survival by 50% if mothers are educated.
The President of
the Global Campaign for Education Kailash Satyarthi in a statement to
political leaders warned “if scientists can genetically modify food and
NASA can send missions to Mars, politicians must be able to find the
resources to get millions of children into school and change the
prospects of a generation of children.”
GCE called on
leaders meeting at the United Nations in New York this week, to make
funding for education a priority in order to meet the target of
universal access to basic schooling by 2015.
It argues that
“poor countries should spend 20% of their national budget on education,
abolishing school fees and be supported to hire an additional 1.9
million teachers so that every child can have access to education.” It
called on rich countries to “direct their aid budgets at the poorest
countries or where inequalities of education are most extreme, rather
using their aid budgets to underwrite the University systems.
