By Onyebuchi Ajufo 

Adamu is a 9-year-old boy from Agwandodo community, Gwagwalada Area Council, Abuja, who dreams of becoming a doctor. He had never missed a single day of school, until his father, the financial provider of the home passed away, taking with him Adamu’s chance of an education and his hopes and dreams for the future.

As sad as Adamu’s story is, it is not unique, it is a problem faced by many developing countries where the government lacks either the political will and/or financial resources required to meet their citizens’ education needs and where many parents are unable to fill the financial gap left by inadequate state-run infrastructure.

Nigeria has the largest number of out-of-school children in the world – over 13 million basic education school-age children (6-14 years old) are currently out of school. Unsurprisingly, poverty plays a significant role. According to a 2017 World Bank report 72% of children from the poorest quintile are out of school, compared to 3% for the richest. Gender and region also play a part, with 60% of out-of-school children being girls. And children in the north—the most economically depressed region of the country and focal point of Boko Haram’s insurgency—are out-of-school at higher rates than the rest of the country. According to StatiSense, 60.7% of school-aged children in Bauchi are out of school; in Lagos, that number is 4.7%.

Education is a fundamental right, one every child should be able to exercise. According to the Universal Basic Education Act of 2004, Adamu and every other Nigerian child are legally entitled to nine years of uninterrupted basic education, including primary schooling and three years of junior secondary school. But Adamu and the millions of other children not in school are being denied not only their right to schooling, but a fair chance to get a good job, to support their families, and to be contributing members of society. There is a direct and indisputable link between access to quality education and economic and social development which means that a lack of education becomes a vicious cycle that makes it difficult for people to pull themselves out of poverty.

nigeria’s education ministry put forward a development framework and a 5 year road map (2015-2020) to improve access to education as well as the quality of that education and the systems that support it. Unfortunately, this programme has not yielded the desired effect due to a lack of accountability and resources. The national budget for education has been on a downward trend since 2015 when it accounted for 10.78% of the total budget to 2019 when it now accounts for only 7% (Takwimu 2019). It is clear that the education system needs systemic change to address some of these barriers which continue to hinder the implementation of an effective education strategy. It is also clear that we cannot rely on government interventions alone to bridge this gap.

Across Nigeria, development actors are working tirelessly to bridge the gap left by inadequate infrastructure and governance across critical areas like education, health, financial inclusion and beyond – one such organisation is Noble Missions for Change Initiative, a tech non-profit social enterprise leveraging data and technology to make education accessible to all children in Nigeria.

Organisations like Noble Missions work to advocate on behalf of vulnerable communities, but the work they do is impeded by the lack of high quality data and insights required to advocate effectively. From policymaking to revenue allocation decisions, to driving advocacy and aid, to showing citizens where and how public funds are being spent, access to data and evidence-based decision-making is crucial to furthering the development agenda in Nigeria and across the continent – as well as supporting these change-makers in the amazing work that they do to educate, influence and advocate for change in their communities.

Read Also: Education crisis: Mark seeks curriculum review

Access to quality data is only the starting point – effective advocacy needs compelling stories that turn data into visual, written or auditory stories to capture attention and trigger action.  The Noble Missions team recently attended a workshop focused on data-driven storytelling and advocacy organised by Takwimu as part of a strategy to create partnerships and a community where African change-makers in the development space  can network, access expert analysis and l data as well as share data-driven advocacy best practices.

The team at Takwimu recognise the need to invest in the digital infrastructure and communications skills needed by development actors to access high quality data sources, mine these for locally relevant insights and package for optimum impact and influence. Takwimu is organising a series of workshops across the continent to champion the importance of visual, data-driven storytelling and advocacy and showing development actors how this data can be used to achieve development objectives.

Noble Missions is already making a difference in the lives of many children. They captured the attention of the public with Adamu’s story and created a crowd-funding initiative that raised enough money to send Adamu to school for five years, including school fees, uniforms, books and other necessary materials. This means that Adamu’s dream of becoming a doctor can still become a reality. But there are many more Adamus across Nigeria and the continent who desperately need and deserve a chance at a better quality of life. Organisations like Noble Mission can campaign with more influence and impact when they have access to high quality data and insights and the capacity to make full use of these assets in their campaigning activities.

As we strive to embody the SDGs’ mission to ‘leave no one behind’ and focus on plugging information gaps to empower change-makers across the continent, it is important to remember that access to data is not in itself a panacea to our current development issues. Investments in technology and situating the data within the local context are necessary if people are to use data effectively. Empowering local development actors, media and social media influencers to harness visual data and succinct analysis to sharpen and add weight to their advocacy and storytelling initiatives is a powerful way to improve evidence-based policymaking and decision-making. Adamu and many like him are counting on this.

• Ajufo is Group Head, Client Service, Africa Practice.

By Tunde Braimoh

That every society, whether in the developing or advanced economies of the world, face all manners of challenge in their dynamics and evolution cannot be over emphasised.

However, the truth is many of these challenges have been overcome, even in the so–called third world thus precipitating the changes in people’s form and standards of living.

Such feats were not accomplished by luck, magic, drama or wishful thinking but by focus, conscious and concerted efforts as well as the can-do spirits of both the leaders and the led to engender the desired changes.

This is the major reason a country like Rwanda, which many used to refer to as ‘war torn’ is today receiving global acclaim.

Though, it is not yet Uhuru in that country, the fact that it has become a reference point in global politics and economy cannot be trivialized having risen from the abyss of a mindless war that threatened the very foundation of its existence.

To the eternal credit of Rwandans, the once crisis-ridden country is now standing on its feet; a pointer to the fact the black man can achieve whatever goal he sets for himself, not minding the odds.

For Lagos, the heartbeat of the economy of West Africa and the nation’s economic capital, that the state can do far better than it is currently doing in view of its potentials is a great possibility.

This was clearly manifested by the iconoclastic and trail blazing leadership of former governor, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who gave the state’s economy a quantum leap when he held sway as helmsman.

Leveraging on his extensive experience in the corporate world, Tinubu, it was who catapulted Lagos’ internally generated revenue from less than N300 million that he inherited to the billion-naira monthly benchmark. Ever since, the story of Lagos has never been the same. Successive administrations all being of common tendencies have had no choice than build on that redefining foundation.

However, the world owes its development to the adventurous rather than the complacent, hence the need for contemporary administrators of Lagos to draw inspiration from the courage of Tinubu, and, in fact, capitalise and advance on it. Nature has no regard for permanence. Every living thing – plant or animal – either blossoms or plummets into ruins. In the thoughts of Einstein, one cannot persistently do a thing the same way and expect a different result. The prognosis of stagnation, therefore, shall be retrogression. Thus there’s no marking the time on a spot. We either advance or relegate.

Leadership is by courage, not by sentiment. Therefore, we need to take our people out of the woods and break new grounds contemporaneous with world best practices subject, however, to the dictates of our economic realities.  The narrative needs to change, especially in the area of transportation, which is at the heart of economic development, but a major headache in Lagos. It is one of the major indices of a smart city. Surely, with functional and modern transportation systems, we can evenly distribute the populace and functions across the metropolis thus making life more abundant.

Read Also: Lagos Assembly ad hoc committee obeys court order.

With a population of over 20 million, dependence on road transportation, which is the most common for movement of people and goods, needs to be reviewed for social and economic prosperity. This is in view of the fact that Lagos records the most visits from across the country averaging 5, 000 daily with not less than 600 of that number staying put and taking residence in spite of the state’s disadvantaged position in land mass.

It was therefore very thoughtful of the speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly Rt Hon Mudashiru Ajayi Obasa, when he suggested other means of mass transportation in the state, especially rail, at the presentation of 2020 budget by Governor Babajide Sanwo-olu recently.

Said the Speaker: “Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is worthy of note that Lagos State as it is today needs radical, aggressive and logistic revamping. It requires an urgent and holistic revamping. It requires an urgent, economic and infrastructural turn around.

“Mr Governor must be bold to lay a solid foundation to be built on by successive administrations. It is high time we came up with innovative ideas and strategies to bring change to the state with the aim of taking it to the next level. It is common knowledge that doing things the same way will yield same result. But when we desire new things, a marvelous and egalitarian society, we have to look inward and change the approach.

“To move Lagos forward, there is the need to focus more attention on rail to connect the entire Lagos. A rail from Ogun State boundary down to Lekki, Epe; a rail from Ikorodu to the same area should be urgently considered. Those under construction must be speedily completed. No amount of road patching, rehabilitations and constructions will really solve our transportation problem judging by the influx of people into Lagos on a daily basis. With money or not, we have to start doing something.”

Obasa equally admonished Governor Sanwo-Olu to take advantage of the state’s aquatic endowment by embracing water transportation. This suggestion by Obasa has been commended by traditional rulers, top politicians, critical stakeholders, activists and citizens of the state.

Obasa understands the minds of Lagosians and acknowledges the governor is not resting. He knows that the pace and tempo Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has taken  while hitting the ground running , will only lead the state somewhere in the next few years – advancement. The governor, only recently, urged the residents to be patient as his government will never bring suffering to them.

For Lagos to retain its leadership seat in the comity of states, it has to continually break new grounds. Upward mobility from a level of survival to the next level of comfort or abundance is somewhat strenuous, stressful, beleaguered and sometimes so excruciating that it is avoided as unnecessary. However, we roll backward when we fail to move forward.

In view of the background of the Obasa-led Lagos Assembly as a ‘deliverer on its promises’, there is no doubt that work will soon be completed on the budget in the overall interest of Lagosians who desire  the translation of the unity of lofty ideas between the governor and the speaker into real time action. Trust Mr Speaker, he had already railroaded his colleagues into a three-day intensive action retreat from November 22 – 25 organised to analyse the general principles and objects of the budget estimates…Saturdays and Sundays have, for the time being, been officially redesigned as “official “working hours in the Lagos Assembly with clear indications that most if not all of the public holidays coming up during the Yuletide will suffer the same fate as far as the Lagos lawmakers are concerned. This, according to the speaker, is the only clear way he and his colleagues could charge themselves towards service-orientation to the people. “To lead is to serve,” he said.

As representatives of the people, this is the least we can do, in conjunction with the executive, based on our avowed commitment to make life more abundant for Lagosians. What is worth doing at all is worth doing very well in good time. With the redefined synergy and unity of purpose between the Lagos lawmakers and the executive, Lagosiams are definitely in for a better deal.

• Braimoh is chairman Lagos State House Committee on Information, Strategy and Security.