Education in Nigeria

Nigeria: Free basic education, not Almajiri system

Noticias

Africa/ Nigeria/ 29.07.2019/ Source: guardian.ng.

Although the Federal Government has been vacillating over the proscription of the Almajiri system practised mainly in the northern part of the country the directive by President Muhammadu Buhari to governors, the other day, seemed to have made any proposed soft landing for the Almajiri system superfluous. While the suspension of the proscription might have given some respite to supporters of the Islamic education system, the president’s charge to governors to enforce free basic education was an indirect castigation of the obnoxious practice.

It is somewhat curious that within 24 hours, three confusing statements about the same Almajiri and free basic education had hit the public space. While the National Security Adviser, Babagana Monguno, suggested that the Federal Government was going to proscribe the Almajiri for security reasons, a quick reaction came from the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, stating that the government had no immediate plan to ban the Almajiri system. In the same breath, the president directed governors to enforce the provision of basic education. What kind of conceptual confusion on public policy is this at the highest level?

Despite confusing statements emanating from the presidency over what to do at the moment about the Islamic education system, it is gratifying that the same presidency was considering its proscription or some sort of overhaul. And perhaps the president’s charge to governors to enforce free basic education might be the way to overhaul that controversial practice.

When one considers the glaring absence of free basic education in Nigeria, the filthy, disease-prone, unhealthy environments that many children are nurtured, the incessant abuse they face and the absence of food, drinking water and adequate healthcare, one would begin to appreciate the frightful clarity of the bleak future befalling Nigerian children. For Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State, this is calamity befalling the children of the north. The point could not have been better made by one of the leading lights in the region, Governor el-Rufai.

The Kaduna State governor was recently quoted as saying: “Looking at the statistics, Nigeria appears to be a middle income country but if we segregate those statistics across states and zones, you will see that in terms of human development indicators, Nigeria consists of two countries. There is a backward, less educated and unhealthy Northern Nigeria and a developing, largely educated and healthy southern Nigeria.”

No cultural practice captures this grim reality of northern Nigeria than the Almajiri system. In the faith-based education practice, for all the value it portends, one beholds in one clear relief the backwardness this system courts, after all. This system of Quranic education, which stated seven hundred years ago in the Kanem-Bornu empire, is so entrenched in the socio-cultural life of many states in northern Nigeria that it has now drawn government attention. So controversial has the  system been that it has also attained notoriety for being touted as one of those institutional problems financed by the government, just like the wasteful nomadic education project of former education minister, Professor Jubril Aminu.

Whereas in prominent Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the elite send their wards to the Ivy League institutions in Europe and America, it is interesting to note that Nigeria is the only country where this practice is being promoted in this modern time. It is also paradoxical that some of the elite who support the system have their own wards educated and trained in some of the best educational institutions in and outside the country. This is hypocritical, unjust and callous.

Despite the glaring state of deprivation and abuse being faced by the Almajiris, some academics, supportive of Almajiricin (the Almajiri type of education) due to ethnic bias, have laboured to provide intellectual backing and search out beneficial justification for this practice. Some have argued that this Spartan training of Islamic acolytes have raised up some of the holy Mallams that have become spiritual directors to politicians and business men. Others have argued that the Almajiricin is a school of life that inculcates discipline, self-mortification and religious education. Such pundits have also explained that the value of the extremely austere living condition of the children and somewhat subterranean curriculum of the Almajiricin have been greatly misunderstood by the westernised mind.

Notwithstanding, the northern elite should not live in denial and breed an uncritical mass that would be used as cannon fodder for ethnic bigotry and religious intolerance. They should bear in mind that Nigeria is the only country where this obscure religious educational system is being encouraged. Well-meaning Nigerians, especially those from the north, should hold their state and local governments to ransom, and commit them to enforce free, quality basic education. It is for this reason that political actors from the north should give heed to the counsel of progressive leaders like the former Governor of Central Bank and now an Emir in Kano, Lamido Sanusi, who has consistently decried the poor quality of education of the children in the north, the widespread poverty and widening rich-poor gap in that part of the country.

Therefore, Nigerians should support the government in hastening the proscription of the anachronistic education system not mainly because of the abuse of the children themselves but also because of the consequences that educational disparity between the north and south pose for the security and overall well-being of the country.

If Quranic education is necessary to the socio-cultural wellbeing of its people, stakeholders should call for the establishment of standard educational centres where genuine, positive and transformational values of self-development and national growth could be achieved. They should adapt the models of progressive nations where this form of qualitative education has been adjudged beneficial to the overall development of a country.

Given that free basic education is a right, civil society organisations, faith-based associations and cultural groups should educate parents and parents-to-be on the task of responsible parenthood. Parenting is not only about the capacity to bring forth an offspring; it also entails the demand of parents to be responsible for the choices made. Often, many parents have resorted to religious injunctions and some misunderstood African traditions as justifications for the wanton violation of the rights of children. It, therefore, behoves the civil society to question the social value of such practices when they provide justifications for abuse under the guise of providing moral education.

To this end, government and relevant authorities should effectively enforce the Child Rights Act by ensuring that parents, caregivers and formal guardians who infringe on the rights of children are prosecuted. The right thing therefore at this time is enforcement of free basic education as guaranteed by even the organic law of the land.

Source of the notice: https://guardian.ng/opinion/free-basic-education-not-almajiri-system/

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Growing Through Education in Nigeria

Noticias

Africa/ Nigeria/ 16.07.2019/ Source: blogs.imf.org.

Our chart of the week, drawn from the IMF’s 2019 economic health check for Nigeria, highlights substantial inequality in access to education between girls and boys, and between rich and poor.

It is widely accepted that addressing educational gaps results in rapid and large benefits for children, their families, communities, and the country more broadly.

Limited schooling for girls

According to a survey conducted by the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics, a girl born into a Nigerian family in the poorest fifth of society spends about 1 year in school—approximately a third of the already limited schooling enjoyed by, say, her brother.

Access to education improves as a family gets richer, but gender inequality in education is entrenched and barely disappears for the richest 20 percent of households.

We believe that closing gender gaps in education across all income groups could boost GDP by 5 percent in one generation. It would lower income inequality by 2¼ points as measured by the Gini coefficient—a reduction that many countries strive to achieve over decades.

Spending beyond education

The government and development partners all recognize that more resources and structural changes are needed to improve access to education and make it more equitable.

Adequate funding for teachers and schools can help raise the quality of education. But spending beyond the classroom can also yield educational benefits. For example, investments in safe access to water and sanitation facilities will improve health and therefore learning opportunities for all kids, while giving an extra boost to school attendance. Mobilizing revenue through, for instance, comprehensive VAT reform and improved tax administration will be critical to fund these efforts.

Other reforms require few additional resources and are important in shaping priorities. Passing into law the Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill and implementing a Children’s Rights Act are examples of legal changes that would put equality of opportunity on the statute books—a move which would have a positive impact for generations to come.

Source of the notice: https://blogs.imf.org/2019/06/24/growing-through-education-in-nigeria/

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Helpdesk Report: K4D – Stunting, Wasting, and Education in Nigeria

Documentos

Africa/ Nigeria/ 19.03.2019/ Source: reliefweb.int.

Summary

Globally, the number of primary school children with nutritional deficiencies is high. This rapid review focuses on children with such deficiencies (namely stunting and wasting), and how it affects them throughout their primary education. Although the focus is on Nigeria, other country examples and their approaches to address this issue are also included, where available.
Key points are:

  • As hungry children find it difficult to concentrate (Muiru et al., 2014; Foodbank, 2015;
    Businge, 2016), their learning needs and outcomes are different to well-nourished children.
  • Countries respond to these children in different ways: the most popular being school feeding programmes, e.g. in India, which has a high prevalence of stunting and wasting, there is the free Midday Meal Scheme, which is the largest such scheme in the world (Singh et al., 2012).
  • However, such approaches have varying impacts: positive effects on measured learning were found in Burkina Faso and Peru (World Bank Group, 2018). However, in Kenya, providing school meals took significant time away from the classroom, and so they had an ambiguous net effect (World Bank Group, 2018). Therefore, it is worth noting that although school feeding gets children to school, it does not always improve learning (FAO et al., 2018).
  • Differences were found between urban and rural areas: in Nigeria, children from rural areas are almost twice as likely to be stunted as children from urban areas.
  • In Nigeria, as part of a public private partnership, Bridge school teachers use an innovative programme designed to scale up effective new approaches to education.
    However, no evidence is available on successful approaches to teaching malnourished children, e.g. how the timetable is organised, what practices are used in the classroom, what resources are used, etc.
  • Read-Aloud (RA) story lessons in reading and maths learning outcomes in northern Nigeria were evaluated by Moussa et al. (2018). The Reading and Numeracy Activity (RANA) Programme provides training, monitoring, and support to help teachers properly use these materials in class. Maths RA lessons were relatively more effective than the language RAs in improving listening comprehension, missing number identification, and maths word problem scores- however these results are for low socio-economic status pupils, not necessarily malnourished ones.
  • Preliminary findings of the school-based component of Young Lives research found a relationship between teacher qualifications and experience, and pupil’s maths scores (Woldehanna et al., 2017).
  • In the classroom, large numbers of over-age malnourished pupils present a challenge for teachers, who must teach a more diverse group with lower levels of maturity and school preparedness.
  • Teaching malnourished children does not seem to feature in the curricula of teacher training programmes (Drury, 2102; Rampal & Mander, 2013). In 2018, the Nigerian Federal Government revealed plans to revamp the country’s basic education sector – however there is no detail regarding specific approaches to teaching malnourished children
  • The available evidence suggests the need for teacher training to be relevant to classroom reality, to maximise the chance of teachers adopting new techniques in the classroom, and to be linked to better management of teachers at the school level to maximise time on task (Vogel and Stephenson, 2012).
  • Chinyoka (2014) recommends that teachers adapt their behaviour to motivate the learners to work and co-operate with peers. This teaching methodology is supported by Snowman and Biehler (2011).
  • In South Africa, the First National Bank Fund Primary Education Programme (PEP) aims to train teachers to identify pupils affected by malnutrition, as well as assisting them in what they can do to help these learners. The end-term evaluation recommends that the programme clearly had a positive impact in most objective areas (Khulisa Management Services & Bisgard, 2017).

The main sources of evidence used for the rapid review were taken from peer reviewed journals, as well as grey literature and investigative projects. In general, nutrition status of primary schoolchildren in Africa has received relatively little attention in comparison to that of younger children (Saltzman et al., 2016). Most of the data available focuses on the causes of malnutrition, and the effect of adapting diet to improve education. There is little empirical evidence on the effect of childhood malnutrition on children’s cognitive achievements in low-income countries (Woldehanna et al., 2017). There are limited teaching approaches specifically used in Nigeria.

The evidence found was ‘gender-blind,’ as there is very little information available exploring the experiences of girls and boys who are affected by nutritional deficiencies in the early education system. Children with physical disabilities were not a focus of this rapid review.

Link of the document: https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/540_Stunting_Wasting_and_Education_in_Nigeria.pdf

Source of the notice: https://reliefweb.int/report/nigeria/helpdesk-report-k4d-stunting-wasting-and-education-nigeria

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Education in Nigeria: Overcoming Mass Displacement

Noticias

Africa/Nigeria/By Kathryn Quelle/Source: www.borgenmagazine.com.

Boko Haram is a militant group in northern Nigeria that wants to institute Islamic law. The group also operates in Chad, Niger and Cameroon, but it originated in Nigeria in the late 1990s. The ongoing Boko Haram insurgency officially started in 2009, and since then militants have killed at least 20,000 people. The violent attacks have also displaced about two million Nigerians, with little chance of them being able to return home in the near future.

Mass internal displacement has a large impact on a country’s economy as well as its resources and living conditions. Displacement also greatly affects education. An estimated 952,029 Nigerian children have been displaced with little or no access to education because of the Boko Haram violence. At one point, the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria reported that only 28 percent of primary age children attended school in Borno state in northern Nigeria, as opposed to 97 percent in most parts of southern Nigeria.

In the local Hausa dialect, Boko Haram means “Western education is forbidden” and the quality of education in Nigeria will suffer if the group succeeds in their goals. In 2016, Human Rights Watch reported that Boko Haram had deliberately killed more than 600 teachers. Attacks in northern Nigeria have also destroyed more than 900 schools and forced at least 1,500 to close.

In combination with local NGOs, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the three-year Education Crisis Response (ECR) program in 2014 to address the fractured system of education in Nigeria. According to USAID, the program’s goal was to “expand access to quality and protective non-formal education and alternative education opportunities for out-of-school children, ages 6 to 17.”

Results in the Classroom

During ECR’s tenure in Nigeria, USAID partner Creative Associates International established more than 1,400 non-formal learning centers and more than 700 formal schools. Creative reached more than 80,000 children, 23 percent more than its target of 65,000. USAID’s final report found that 47 percent of the children reached by the program had never attended school before.

When ECR was launched, USAID performed a baseline assessment. The agency found that 64 percent of the children scored at zero level for Hausa and 50 percent scored at zero level for English, meaning the children could not even recognize letters from the languages. After three years, USAID’s endline assessment found that 49 percent could read Hausa and 37 percent could read English, showing significant improvement.

Besides substantially raising literacy rates in both Hausa and English, ECR also addressed mathematical knowledge. At the beginning of the program, 40 percent of children could not recognize the numbers 1-9. At the end, the same percentage were able to perform basic mathematic functions.

Beyond the Classroom

Beyond simply improving education in Nigeria, the learning centers set up by the program also provide meals and help students get to and from school. For example, ECR established 12 non-formal education centers specifically for children with physical disabilities, and the program distributed wheelchairs and crutches to the students. These 12 centers enrolled 539 children over three years and, in addition to basic knowledge and skills, the centers taught children vocational skills that they can utilize even after the program has ended.

The ECR program also focused on children’s psychosocial development. Many of the children in the program were displaced due to attacks on their homes and villages, leaving them traumatized. USAID recognized that children have a hard time learning when their fears and traumas are not addressed, and it trained facilitators on how to teach children sensitively.

Facilitators encouraged positive, interactive student-teacher relations and used group exercises to encourage children to make friends and interact with each other. Within local communities, organizations also encouraged spreading messages of peace. ECR director Ayo Oladini said, “We make sure that we don’t create any more trauma, either for these children or within the community where they live.”

Ensuring the Continued Success of Education in Nigeria

Throughout its tenure, ECR was supported by Nigeria’s state and federal governments. Officials helped determine which communities to focus efforts in, developed training manuals and sat in on classes. Every learning center established also had two local government education officials assigned to mentor teachers.

Nigeria’s government further demonstrated their commitment to education and ensuring ECR’s continued success by implementing transition plans worth $287,709 in its 2017 budget. The budget has been used to establish 100 more non-formal learning centers following ECR’s model and train more than 8,000 formal school teachers in conflict-sensitive education. At the end of the three years, five Nigerian state governments separately promised to replicate ECR’s non-formal education model.

In addition to government support, ECR mainstreamed 30,154 children who passed its end-of-program exam into formal schools to ensure the children’s continued success. ECR also provided them with additional free scholastic materials. Even though the ECR program has ended, the program has re-established quality education in Nigeria and helped a lot of kids get back to school.

Source of the notice: http://www.borgenmagazine.com/school-fees-in-africa/

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Expired education and Africa’s learning crisis

The Guardian

By The Guardian

The recent dismal report of a new World Bank study, which stated that Africa faced learning crises that may hinder its economic growth and the well-being of the citizens, questions the quality of basic education African governments have been providing their people. It is also an eye-opener to the abysmal degeneration of succession management for the society. Although keen observers of events on the continent have been worried about the celebration of mediocrity pervading key areas of society, this new study has presented bleak hope for Africa’s future, if drastic measures are not taken to address basic education. This is disheartening and highly lamentable.

The World Development Report (WDR) 2018, titled “Learning to Realise Education’s Promise”, was co-launched in Abuja the other day by the World Bank Group, the Federal Ministry of Finance and the Federal Ministry of Education. Whilst the report raised concerns about poor future prospect of millions of young students in low and middle-income countries owing to the failure of their primary and secondary schools to educate them to succeed in life, it also called for greater measurement, action on evidence, and coordination of all education actors.

It claimed that despite “considerable progress in boosting primary and lower secondary school enrollment, … “some 50 million children remain out of school, and most of those who attend school are not acquiring the basic skills necessary for success later in life.”

To substantiate its claims, the report noted that among second-grade students assessed on numeracy tests in several sub-Saharan African countries, three-quarters could not count beyond 80 and 40 per cent could not solve a one-digit addition problem. It went further to add: “In reading, between 50 and 80 per cent of children in second grade could not answer a single question based on a short passage they had read, and a large proportion could not read even a single word.”

Concerning Nigeria, the study found out that, when fourth grade students were asked to complete a simple two-digit subtraction problem, more than three-quarters could not solve it. It further stated that “Among young adults in Nigeria, only about 20 per cent of those who complete primary education can read. These statistics do not account for 260 million children who for reasons of conflict, discrimination, disability, and other obstacles, are not enrolled in primary or secondary school.”

Deon Filmer and Halsey Rogers, World Bank Lead Economists, who co-directed the report team, summarized the report when they stated “too many young people are not getting the education they need.” This remark corroborated the observation of Prof. Gamaliel O. Prince, the Vice Chancellor of University of America, California, who remarked at the matriculation of its Nigerian affiliate students, that Nigerians are receiving expired education. The question now is, what kind of education do African young people need?

As if a section of Nigerian youths foresaw the World Bank report, they had, two weeks, earlier flayed the poor education of Nigerian leaders, and had set a list of criteria for the next president. According to them, “many of our past and present leaders are an embarrassment to the country due to their very low educational background and lack of exposure.” These remarks are very instructive because, if today’s leaders, reputed to have had quality basic education, are leading the country astray, the quality of future leaders leaves little to imagine about when the discouraging report of the World Bank is considered.

The vital point that should not be missed in the interpretation of the report is the emphasis on quality basic education. This aspect speaks to Nigeria, where the idea of the educated is construed on the basis of holding a university degree. What kind of education would one claim to have acquired if he earned a university degree and cannot solve the problems of basic numeracy and comprehension? What kind of outcomes would be accomplished by the kind of learning provided by today’s educational institutions? This is not to assert that Nigeria does not have well-trained and adequate manpower. This is far from the truth. The highly quality manpower and human resources which Nigeria has in abundance could be seen in the value Nigerian professionals have added to the growth and progress of other countries.

As this newspaper has always admonished, addressing the problem of education in this country demands emergency response. What this country needs is a leadership that is vision-casting enough to align its human resources for growth in production. All it takes is a vision, the political will to realize that vision, and the sincerity of purpose in mobilizing the people around that vision. If learning is to be impactful and effective as to lead to personal development and pragmatic relevance to society, then Nigeria and all of Africa must first of all, understand the problem they face. Owing to the experiences of colonization, neo-colonization and even globalization, Nigeria and other African countries find themselves in the shackles of economic slavery, and have tied their educational curricula to exploitable learning models that service foreign powers.

Because the structure of income-generation and production has a part to play in learning outcomes in African countries, education ministries and stakeholders of such countries must see learning as a tool for solving problems and generating production in the society. Education should have a promise for children and youths in Africa; incentives should be made available for structured learning.

One of the maladies of African leaders is cronyism and nepotism. This extension of selfish interests to the benefits of family, friends, clans, ethnic groups and political party loyalists has encouraged the dominance of mediocrity in leadership in a manner that suffocates excellence. African leaders should build a culture of succession management founded on excellence so that the right persons in the right places would think out the right policies to move their countries forward. They should take a cue from forward-looking countries by identifying the best in all fields, and positioning them as managers for national reconstruction.

Furthermore, African leaders should go back to the drawing-board and identify the problems facing their people, and on the basis of this, begin to design curricula that should enable African children think inwards. Learning models should consider the role of history in understanding the African predicament and how it can empower them to think about Africa’s place in a competitive world. These models should also stress the relevance of language in learning.

To effectively get this done in Nigeria, especially, and save the nation from its many crises, it is indeed apparent that restructuring into a properly run federalism would have to drive structured learning.

Source of the article: https://guardian.ng/opinion/expired-education-and-africas-learning-crisis/

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