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YouthHub Africa, others, link poor funding with low quality education in states

By Matthew Ogune Abuja
23 February 2023   |   7:00 pm
CIVIL Society Organizations (CSOs) working to improve the state of education in Nigeria have linked the quality of basic education in some states to poor budgetary allocation.

CIVIL Society Organizations (CSOs) working to improve the state of education in Nigeria have linked the quality of basic education in some states to poor budgetary allocation.

The civil societies noted that insignificant budgetary allocation to basic education and poor educational infrastructure was a major bane of quality basic education in many states. They said this in a report presented to the public yesterday in Abuja.

The report launched by Riplington Education Initiatives in partnership with YouthHub Africa and Christian Aid interrogated the quality of infrastructure, basic education and teachers in some states.

Executive Director, YouthHubAfrica, Rotimi Olawale, therefore called on governors to invest in quality basic education.

He said: “We want the state governments to use this as a tool to see how they can improve quality education beyond building infrastructure. We have commissioned a new classroom because I think that is the wave that we are seeing with governors across Nigeria.

“No, you need to ask yourself, are the learners learning? If you do all of that and the learners are not learning, then we are not doing enough and that is the reason we want to provide this ranking as an advocacy tool for us to also hold the government accountable to providing quality education for students.”

On the findings, the Lead Consultant, REI, Blessing Tarfa, stated that about 29 states suffer from poor infrastructure as many of the students were unable to read and write.

She said that many states are hardly making efforts to ensure that the educational status of their state is adequately improved.

Tarfa said: “The project basic ranking was basically just to assess how the states are faring in providing quality education within their states in Nigeria. So, we had to do a selection of indicators of quality education and classified them into the inputs they made by the states and what is the outcome.

“So, the inputs are basically the infrastructure, the teachers that are available in the schools and, then the outcome is the learning outcomes. So, foundational reading skills and foundational numeracy skills were the outcomes. And in between, we also had some extra indicators like the attendance, the completion rates and then, the transition rates.

“For the budget allocation, according to UNESCO, 15 per cent of the budget should go into education. So, we cut it back from seven per cent to 2.5 per cent in our assessment, but 29 states are not meeting it.”

Adding: “Some, as low as 0.2 per cent of their budget go to education. For every teacher, there should be 35 learners but for the one toilet, there should be 25 users. But we had the highest toilet ratio, very shocking 890 learners to one toilet.”

Advocacy Manager, Palladium, Laz Apir, noted that all the stakeholders from the local government to the federal government need to declare a state of emergency in our primary education. And when we talk about a state of emergency, it means all resources must not be held back. Governors should be out in the field inspecting what has been done in terms of provision of these facilities.”

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