The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is helping Nigeria and its beleaguered school-age children to turn the corners, as illustrated in the achievements the agency is recording in the northern part of the country. In this piece, Education Editor, IYABO LAWAL, who was in Monguno, a sleepy community in Borno State, examines UNICEF’s digitalisation for the learning and development of Nigerian children illustrated by the learning app, Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), and role in tackling the out-of-school syndrome in the region.

Nigeria’s National Policy on Education states that children should learn to read in the language of their immediate environment.
This policy reflects the teaching and learning implications from the vast empirical evidence showing that learning to read in early grades in a familiar language that one already speaks fluently is the most effective method of early-grade reading instruction.

The North East is the least-performing region when it comes to foundational skills. This situation has been exacerbated by an inequitable and poorly performing education system in the region before the insurgency, with large cohorts of children and youths out of school.

To bridge the access to quality learning opportunities, UNICEF and the Federal Ministry of Education launched the Nigeria Learning Passport (NLP) last year, an online, mobile, and offline digital learning platform powered by Microsoft that enables continuous access to 15,000 curriculum-aligned learning and training materials in local languages for learners, teachers, and parents.

The disruption to education by school attacks has forced millions of children to miss out on learning they would have acquired if they had been in the classroom, with over 10 million children absent from school at the primary level. For those in school, the quality of learning is poor, with 75 per cent of primary school-age pupils unable to read with understanding or solve a simple mathematics problem.

The picture looks grim
The education sector in Nigeria faces many challenges, including access to quality learning stalled by low domestic spending on education, resulting in limited school infrastructure and qualified teachers, high levels of poverty, and social norms not supportive of education, especially for girls, worsened by attacks on schools and mass abduction of schoolchildren.

The UNICEF Chief of Education, Saadhna Panday-Soobrayan, said the agency focuses on improving learning in the North by introducing some modules. “We have Kanuri Arithmetic and Reading Initiative (KARI), which is focused on pupils in grades one to three, to improve reading amongst these learners, and it’s based on a model called structured pedagogy,” she explained.

“In structured pedagogy, you train teachers on the science of reading, using a combination of a whole language approach and onyx as a standard way of learning how to read. But there’s a snag, Panday- Soobrayan noted, because the teachers “are not highly qualified, they don’t understand the science of reading, we have to give them a lesson plan, the teacher should be able to develop his or her lesson plan, but we give them a lesson plan that says the learning objective and how to teach the different components of the lesson.”

“The first model involves teaching children how to read, while the second model, has to do with remediating lags in the learning levels of the children in grades four to six. And together, the combination of Kari and TaRL is very effective in sorting out foundational literacy and numeracy,” the UNICEF official stated. “Both of these skills are critical for the child to succeed in other subjects. So, the problem of lack of foundation literacy and numeracy is called across the world a learning crisis and learning poverty.”

Less than a decade ago, 54 per cent of children in low and middle-income countries could not read well, unable to understand a simple sentence. That number has risen post-COVID-19 to over 70 per cent. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is high; close to 90 per cent of children cannot read well and understand.

Panday-Soobrayan lamented: “Can you imagine going to school, spending three years of your life, and realising that you’ve learnt nothing?” She continued: “You know, if you don’t learn some fundamental skills, you can’t learn the higher level skills, and so, in Nigeria, we have three out of four children who cannot read a simple sentence and understand it, and neither can they solve a simple mathematics problem. It’s programmes like this that can turn that around.”

In the North West, Kanuri and Hausa are commonly spoken languages. In the region, UNICEF uses TaRL, which has been extensively tested; Kari is also deployed, producing strong evidence of the ‘girls education project’ programme. It was run over 10 years in six states in the North West, bringing 1.5 million girls back to school and achieving gender parity in the six North West states. There was a marked improvement in English language, Hausa, and mathematics learning levels.

TaRL intervention promises to ensure that those children in school will learn the foundational skills they need for a better future. TARL’s theory of change is driven by an understanding that if children are supported with remedial co-curricular learning activities based on their levels of literacy and numeracy using their mother tongue as a medium of instruction, they will quickly acquire foundational skills and get back to school.

“We have solid evidence that this works. And we’re now at a stage where this needs to be replicated in many more states,” said Panday-Soobrayan.

Some state governments have seen the success of TaRL. Already, about 331,000 children have benefited from the learning module. There are about 19 states that UNICEF focuses on, and for education in particular, it focuses on 12 states, mostly in the north, because the out-of-school rate and learning levels “are the poorest in the north.”

“However, if a state asked for support, we might not be able to bring a lot of money to that state, but we bring our technical support resources. So, Edo State and Lagos, for example, asked for our support, and we are there,” Panday-Soobrayan reveals. “They have the money to roll out programmes, but they need the thinking, the approach, the design, and set-up of how we do it, so we are supporting.”

For the last 10 years, the UN agency has been focusing on building the model to get children to school, particularly girls resulting in 1.5 million female pupils brought into the system: gender parity achieved with a decrease in early marriage and pregnancy rates declined, while the youth literacy level increased.

“So, state governments slowly are figuring out this is something they can use to solve the learning problem. But we need all states to do it.

We evaluated Reading and Numeracy Activity (RANA), its Hausa-based early grade reading approach, which integrates numeracy and gender themes into its materials, which is the equivalent of TaRL, it costs just $8 per child,” the UNICEF representative adds. “It’s very low cost, and when you do it, it economies of scale, when you produce the materials in large numbers, it costs down to almost nothing. “It’s highly effective; we’ve got the solution.”

The Borno government is regarded as being heavily committed to UNICEF projects. The UN agency wants TARL to be rolled out in every LGA in Borno and Yobe and then across all the states in Nigeria, says the official.

UNICEF aims to get more girls into primary school. Recognising there’s a high level of poverty in Nigeria, and parents cannot afford to send their daughters to school, UNICEF provided cash to the household, finding out that providing cash was “very effective in getting girls into school.”

“The mother used the money to send the child to school, pay some of the costs of schooling. She then used the rest to generate income so that she can sustain it when she starts her own business or something else like that,” Panday-Soobrayan discloses. “Then, she puts a better quality meal on her table, the quality of the meal improves, and they also eat regularly, and the siblings also benefit from going to school.”

UNICEF is also banking on strong community mobilisation, with deliberate efforts to integrate the social norm and avoid the tag of the so-called Western education. “So, we did a lot of community mobilisation with traditional leaders, religious leaders, mother’s association, and school-based management committee responsible for governance. It’s a parent-teacher body,” says UNICEF.

That was critical.

UNICEF also provided grants to schools, but to receive that money, they needed to have a school improvement plan concerning things they want to do like fixing infrastructures, toilets, and extra classrooms, and we gave them some financial literacy, and they were able to repair themselves at a cheaper cost with better quality. The fourth was harping on early-grade reading and numeracy.

Another critical thing UNICEF did was peer education because once “we get the children into school, we need to keep them there.” The peer education platform was formed so that girls can talk about their issues, some of the challenges they face to stay in school, and how to address them. Then people occupying senior positions in society, who can advocate a shift in girls’ education, making sure that girls are tackling difficult issues, were brought in to speak with the school children.

UNICEF needs to ensure that in the next five years, the girls brought to primary school remain in school as all evidence shows that the best returns on girls’ education are a complete 12 years of basic education. Away from that, the agency is also considering how to get girls transitioning to junior secondary school to stay in class, not drop out, asserting “That’s what we’ll be doing for the next five years, and we are actively looking for funding support.”

UNICEF is also exploring building a credible alternative learning system.

“Remember I told you that we work with formal schools but also work with informal schools. We’ve done that in the northwest and northeast because not every parent is happy to send his or her ward to a public primary school,” its representative says. “Some of them would like to go to a Quranic school, but it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t learn how to read and write.”

But given the scale of the out-of-school crisis in Nigeria (10.2 million in primary and 8.1 million in junior secondary), the massive number of children, and the growing child population, classrooms are not enough. There are not enough schools. There’s only one junior secondary school for every five primary schools; “that’s the reason children don’t go to junior secondary school because there are no classrooms.” There is also a “massive deficit” in the number of qualified teachers.

Amidst these encumbrances, UNICEF is drawing lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that “it taught us that even if we can’t be in the brick and mortar building, learning can still happen, and we did it through radio; TV and through digital.”

It was the birth of NLP, a digital platform with 15,000 curriculum map materials on it. If a pupil cannot make it into a classroom, he or she can still learn.

“Now, we think it’s time that Nigeria acknowledged that it needs a credible non-formal system, there are pockets of this across the country, but we need money, human resources, good quality training together with high levels of regulation to be put into it,” states Panday-Soobrayan.

She adds, “So what happens in the almajiri schools is that children come from far away to learn Quran, but the facilities are not there. There’s no infrastructure, no place for them to sleep, and the proprietor doesn’t have money to feed them, so, the children ended up doing a half-day Quranic lesson and go begging on the streets. We need the state governments to come in and begin to regulate that space and support it.”

Nigeria must develop a credible alternative learning system that is accredited, so, if a child goes to a non-formal school and has received some skills, he or she should have some accreditation that allows him or her to go to a public primary school or TVET centre.

That is the challenge for Nigeria in the next five years, Panday-Soobrayan notes, adding, “This is what will be the focus of UNICEF’s work on access in the next five years.”

“Later this year, we will do two things. We will launch what we call the National Assessment of Learning Achievement in Basic Education (NALABE), which is the first credible national learning assessment conducted in the 36 states based on competency, what the child is learning in school, we did in all participating states, and we will release the results later in the year,” Panday-Soobrayan tells The Guardian. “We will also hold a national conference on learning crisis to draw attention to the fact that we’ve got a problem with foundation literacy and numeracy, which is because Nigeria accounts for 15 per cent of the global share of out-of-school children.”

Lessons from Monguno
During a field trip with UNICEF’s Chief of Education to Monguno, a sleepy community in Monguno Local Government Council of Borno State, The Guardian visited some of these schools and observed how a deprived community struggles to provide basic learning opportunities for their wards.

Central Primary School, located at Asheik Zarma Street, and Charamari Primary School, in Monguno LGA, are among the public schools where TaRL has been adopted.

Head Teacher of Central Primary School, Babagana Alhaji Bukar, said TaRL has assisted the children in identifying letters and forming words. So far, Bukar said 38 teachers from the school have been trained on the use of TaRL.

An elated Bukar, who has been in service for 21 years, said TaRL is the best way of teaching in primary schools and appealed to UNICEF to train more teachers and give them incentives to further boost their interest.

One of the teachers, Fatima Abubakar, who was teaching grade five class on what she termed,
‘learning by doing’, said she was trained on TaRL for four weeks and described it as the best model for teaching.

“The programme has proven to be impactful. Before now, most of the pupils could not read, write or construct a paragraph independently, but now they can do it and even form words.”

“ I often felt frustrated with the teacher-centred methodology prescribed by the existing teacher training curriculum. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get all learners to equally understand their subjects.

But after a four-week training on TaRL methodology organised by UNICEF and the Borno State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), I now know better. The training is helping teachers across Borno, Yobe and eight other states realise that existing teaching methods are not child-centred, and take approaches that are more effective to improve literacy and numeracy skills.

Salamatu Idrisu who teaches at Charamari Primary School, was teaching the grade four class when the team arrived at her class. She was teaching the pupils tens and units.

Idrisu who has been teaching for 12 years, shared her experiences with The Guardian: “Teaching with TARL was the best and most interesting training I have ever had. Having already assessed my pupils, I simply cluster them into subgroups based on their capabilities and give them tasks.” she explained.

Idrisu is equally excited about how she learned to use locally available materials as substitutes for teaching resources. We were taught how to improvise with locally available materials like cardboard, sticks, straws, and other materials to teach the pupils,” she said.

Seventeen- year old Abba Mohammed, a primary five pupil of Charamari Primary School listened with keen attention to what he was being taught in the classroom and was eager to demonstrate it when the teacher called them out.
Hassan, who is the class captain, wished to become a teacher and lauded UNICEF for the opportunity to learn.

He said: “I enjoy the teaching approaches adopted, initially, I find it difficult learning but with the new teaching method, I can read, form works, and calculate using tens and units.”

Mohammed wished that more students would be enrolled in school to learn, he thanked UNICEF for the opportunity to go to school and also appealed to the government to make the environment more conducive, construct a water point and toilets so that they would not be practicing open defecation on the school premises.

The pupil’s appeal was echoed by the Principal, Garba Hassan Lawan, who pleaded with the government concerning the perimeter fencing of the school to ward off kidnappers and intruders, and also provide potable water and construct more toilets.

And in line with UNICEF’s resolve to incorporate formal education into Quaranic and Islamic schools to get the teeming Almajiris into school, Panday-Soobrayan said the agency works very closely with religious leaders to integrate foundational literacy and numeracy in Quaranic centres.

According to her, with mobilisation from Centre Based Management Committee (CBMC) for the Islamic centres, enrolment has increased.

At Goni Chariri Sangaya Centre in Monguno Central area of the community, founded by Imam Baba Goni Tuja, there were 159 learners, comprising 143 boys and 16 girls. The centre lacks toilet facilities and is not fenced. UNICEF intervention included the provision of grants to the centre for renovation to make it conducive for learners, the provision of more mats and other teaching materials.

Panday-Soobrayan admitted that there is a lot to do to ensure that more children keep learning, and called on the various state governments to take a cue from the Borno State government and key into the TaRL revolution so that no child is left out.