COMMITTED to reducing the rate of children out of school in Nigeria, the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) in partnership with United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has conceived a new initiative.
Towards this, officials of UBEC and State Universal Basic Education Commissions (SUBEBs), among other recommendations, have been directed to assist communities across the nation to establish more Community Based Early Childhood Care (CBECC) to increase access to Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE).
This was contained in a Baseline Survey of Early Childhood Development and Learning in Nigeria report presented at the “Dissemination of CBECC and Pre-primary Baseline Study Report meeting in Kaduna yesterday.
Speaking during the presentation, Executive Secretary UBEC, Dr. Suleiman Dikko, who was represented by Mr. Pius Osayande Osaghae, Director Academic Services of the commission, sought the support of SUBEBs “to always have ECCE in mind whenever action plans for infrastructure or teachers development are sent to them.”
According to him, “The collaboration with UNICEF is to ensure that we reach the unreached, because we have large group of pupils of school age who are supposed to be in pre-primary section of our schools, but due to the fact that the distance from the nearest school to them may be so much and as children they may not be able to walk that long distance and also the issue of safety comes in.
That is why the UNICEF initiative of CBECC is being aggressively pursued by UBEC with the assistance of UNICEF and also with the cooperation of the states because they are actually the ones to implement. It is one of our cardinal projects to ensure that the unreached children of preschool age are given access to basic education.
Also pre-primary education is now a compulsory policy of the Federal Government. What we are doing now is to create the baseline that will help us to implement it, and some states due to the little we have done so far have even gone ahead to establish some centres.”
Meanwhile, speaking to journalists, Mr. Charles Avelino, UNICEF Education Specialist said that, “Early Childhood Development (ECD) is one of the key priorities of UNICEF, therefore information is needed to intervene, hence the initiative was launched in selected 13 states across the country.”
Avelino explained that though there are so many out of school children in Nigeria and that enrolment is a big challenge, but UNICEF is not only focusing on that, but also in improving the quality of education.
Said he: “So, in terms of access, early childhood development is a key intervention, because when children start early they have the right opportunity to go beyond the primary and secondary schools, that is why we are working on these areas.”
One of the participants, the Executive Secretary of Kaduna State Universal Basic Education, Alhaji Lawal Daura said, “the state is collaborating with UNICEF in order to reach and enroll more children in the rural communities and they are cooperating.”
About 70 communities in 42 local councils in 13 states and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja were selected for the baseline survey.
