Terrorism deprives 658,000 people of education in North East

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) has said that conflict has deprived 685,000 people of education in the North East.

The UN raised the alarm in its 2021 first quarter Dashboard released at the weekend to journalists in Maiduguri, Borno State.

It said: “The targeted people for basic education was 1.1 million, but only 342,000 were reached.”

According to the world body, though $51.3 million (about N19.5 billion) was required for education in the region, only one per cent coverage was recorded in the first quarter of this year.

On the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps covered, the Dashboard disclosed: “About 2,000 IDPs were reached with education, comprising mainly children between the ages of three and 17 years,” lamenting that only 100 returnee IDPs had education during the period under review. “Over 340,000 children and adults accessed education in the host communities of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.

“The number of conflict-affected out-of-school boys and girls accessing education through the learning centres reached only 828 pupils, while the target was 576,897 in the first quarter of 2021.”

The falling trend on education access was also recorded in the number of trained teachers to improve their teaching and learning approaches.

Out of the targeted 19,998 teachers, only 3,892 (19.5 per cent) were reached for training, Dashboard also disclosed, explaining that only 204 School-Based Management Committee (SBMC) members were also trained out of the targeted 6,666 members.

It lamented: “There was a coverage of only 3.1 per cent for the SBMC training.”