Sola POPOOLA
United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF ) has urged the SouthWest states to create multiple learning pathways to combact to menace of out-of school children in the
The global body also charged the region to forge a strong partnerships by setting up education management centres and coming up with homegrown approaches and solutions to the challenge
This call was made during a stakeholder meeting on Out-of-School Children (OOSC) Models, Retention Transition and Completion (RTC), and Re-entry Guideline Activities for South-West Nigeria .
The meeting which was organised by the Oyo State Ministry of Education in collaboration with UNICEF had critical stakeholders from the SouthWest states of Oyo ,Ogun, Ekiti,Ondo Osun and Lagos The commissioners of education from region ,officials of the State Universal Education Board ( SUGEB) members of the Civil Society organizations, as well as the media were in attendance.
Speaking at the event, the Officer in Charge of UNICEF Lagos field ,Mohammed Okorie, said appreciated the renewed commitment of the region to address one of the critical rights of a child.
Okorie emphasized that the advocacy must be geared towards ensuring that no-child is left behind in the quest to win the war .
” Ordinarily, one would expect that each state will be telling us their success story and how much much they have achieved but if we flip the narrative and we are looking at it from the angle of ensuring that no one is left behind or reaching the farthest first then ,you will agreed with me that, a lot still needs to be done. “
He explained that the stakeholders meeting was borne out of the agency’s commitment to ensure children have free access to quality education.
He said that the dialogue was aimed at bringing together key stakeholders from across the southwest states to discuss interventions, identify key performance indicators, as well as develop strategic home grown action plans to mitigate the challenge of out-of-school children in the region.
Okorie said the issue of out of school children and low retention, transition and completion of education by children has become an albatross on the neck of the region that must be urgently addressed.
” I am glad to see the renewed commitment from the region to address one of the critical rights of a child .We must ensure that mo one is left behind. Let’s implement it together ,so that we can achieve the desired result.
This, he, said required that the six state’s government to develop and implement targeted intervention programmes that would address all the factors militating against free access to quality and basic education.
The UNICEF Education Specialist, Azuka Menkiti urged states to create multiple learning pathways to combat the menace of Out-of School Children .
In her presentation centred on National Framework of Action On Reducing the number Out-of-School Children in Nigeria ,the UNICEF Education Specialist, Azuka Mentiki explained the meeting aimed to achieve azfzr reaching approaches to menace .
stressed the urgent need for the states to adopt retention, transition and completion models to tackle the menace of the out of school in the region.
She noted that reduction in the rate of the out of school children and increase in retention, transition and completion rate are achievable should governments expand access to secondary education, enhance quality learning and strengthen their support systems through improved budgeting, implementation of effective policy and set up plans.
Menkiti who advocated for more funding to be allocated to the education sector, especially secondary education, urging the government to stop treating it as a second fiddle to the advantage of basic and tertiary education.
She said increased budgetary allocation for the secondary education would not only significantly reposition the sector, which had suffered utter neglect in terms of infrastructures, equipment, low quality of teachers, leading to the alarming rate of the out of school children.
She said: “This comes from about 10 years of intervention we have done on girls’s education that has shown successful, tested, and skillable interventions that have been able to help us bring girls to school and keep them in school.
“What the two-day meeting is doing is supporting states to begin to look at issues that are drivers of dropouts for adolescents in their states. When we talk about the bigger picture of out-of-school children, we are looking at them from different perspectives: those who have never enroled in school, those who are likely not to enrol in school, and those who have dropped out of school. So we are interested in this meeting for those who are at risk of dropping out and at risk of not actually completing secondary education”, she added.
In his presentation, Babagana Aminu, an education specialist in UNICEF said that retention of school children had been one of the major challenges in the zone.
He said that strategic efforts must be geared towards creating a sustainable solutions to ensure that every Nigerian child has the opportunity to complete their education and assimilating the adolescents that dropped out into the formal education.
“In terms of being out of school in the Southwest, almost on average, putting all six states together according to the multiple cluster indicator survey that was conducted by NBS, it shows that about 8 percent of children are out of school.
“But that is not the most worrisome data, if I must say, concerning the southwest, most of the worrisome data has to do with retention, that is, retaining those children that must have enrolled in school, but not only retaining them; are they completing the level of education that they have enrolled in?
“What I mean is that the completion of primary school children when they are in junior secondary school and, as well, when they transit to senior secondary school, how well are they transiting? Lots of children that enter primary school may not have the opportunity to complete junior secondary school, and that means the future for them is still blurry. So where are these children? That means if they are not in school, they are out of school”, he added.