The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Boosting

  • Boosting education in Lagos State

    Boosting education in Lagos State

    Presently, the education sector in Lagos State is receiving an unprecedented boost from the Lagos State government. When Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) took over from the Asiwaju, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, he made a pledge to the people of the state that he would continue the policy of free education in both primary and secondary schools in the state. This pledge has been carried many steps further since more than five years he has been in the saddle.

    Not only has the free education policy for which the state has been known for years been intensified and improved upon in many respects, Lagos State has come to occupy an enviable position in the annals of West African School Certificate Examination (WAESC) and National Examination Council (NECO) in present times. To cap it all, the government has just established what it rightly tagged Lagos Eko Secondary Education Project, a project that is being assisted by the World Bank.

    This idea, in the reasoning of Ms Ronke Azeez, Special Adviser to Governor Fashola on the project, is to ensure that this World – Bank assisted initiative provides the required grants to schools to improve on students’ welfare, teachers’ training and ICT exposure and provision.

    The retraining of teachers and principals of schools have since attracted the priority attention of the Lagos State government. The reason for this is to help refocus attention on teachers’ welfare so that they can impact meaningful and quality knowledge to the students. Essentially, Governor Fashola believes strongly that if teachers are in the right frame of mind and are equally given what is due to them, they can perform better.

    This is why the Lagos Eko Education project as initiated by the government has come handy to solve a lot of knotty problems in the sector. Until recently, the students of the state were not performing as was expected in WASC and NECO exams. But according to Azeez, the project was able to encourage the students to have an improved rating last year in the WAEC examination. Given the general porous results of WAEC in 2012 throughout the nation, the Lagos State over all result, nonetheless, stood out. This is highly commendable.

    In public funded secondary schools, the state recorded 38.5 percent. The interesting thing here is that many students, even above the expectations of many, recorded credits in both English and Mathematics. This is a total improvement from previous results and Azeez believes that the students can do much more in subsequent years if more teachers are exposed and retrained. In other words, this exercise is an on-going one.

    Mrs. Elizabeth Omolaoye, a principal in the state, reacted to the issue like this: “You must have heard about the Eko Project. It helped many students because we were able to purchase all that we needed to teach the children. Teachers are being trained. And we principals were also trained. I am a beneficiary of the training.” Omolaoye’s enthusiasm has also rubbed off on other such principals and teachers in the state who feel much more at home now to teach with more dedication and care.

    The Eko Project, in the thinking of Governor Fashola, is to completely overhaul education. It is established to improve education tremendously in terms of upgrading ICT and other infrastructural facilities in the sector. As the students become more exposed to the modern forms of education, so do their level of intellectual acumen and sense of reasoning.

    In its third year now, the Lagos Eko Project has overcome its initial teething problems. It is now totally embedded in the principle of impacting on the students, expanding and improving the lot of teachers and making them more responsible and responsive to the needs of their students. In addition to providing grants for equipments and other learning facilities, the primary focus of the project revolves around manpower empowerment and training. This, being the core area of its focus, has been wholesomely pursued in the past three years.

    Part of the focus of the project is also to grade schools and give them awards. It is a sort of an encouraging exercise so as to keep the standard high and competitive. Azeez said: “Schools are rewarded based on their average performance. This has helped the teachers and principals to be more interested in enhancing the overall performance of the students. Indeed, the unique thing about this is that we looked at the whole schools and then rewarded those whose students made up more on the average performance” In the process of doing this, schools that did well got more funds to perform more feats.

    For a government that is serious, the training of teachers is number one step towards improving the standard of education. This is what Governor Fashola has promptly done given that students cannot get anything good if they are not getting the best from both the government and their teachers. It is equally great to learn that Lagos State has re-introduced Saturday extra-murral classes to help students with low acumen and learning process.

    In this regard, a lot of teachers are being encouraged to take heed so that their students can benefit from this benevolence. Tagged Mathematical tonic and English clinic, it is formatted to impact more in these two key subjects where students have shown poor ratings in recent past.

    Based on all these modalities already in place in the education sector in the state, it behoves on both the students and teachers to capitalise on them to make education prosper. The state government has demonstrated its love for the people. It has shown that leaders of tomorrow should be guided well for the responsibilities of tomorrow. Therefore, Governor Fashola needs to be commended for his foresight and direction in all spheres in the state. Eko oni baje .

    • Udoka, lives Ikeja.

     

     

  • Boosting food production in Kebbi

    Agriculture accounts for a substantial aspect of Kebbi State’s economy. Food crops include guinea corn, rice and millet while cash crops include groundnut and cotton.

    Others are wheat, beans, tobacco, sugar cane, sweet potatoes and vegetables, such as onion, pepper and tomatoes.

    Almost 75 per cent of the population make their living from farming. Many factors give Kebbi its competitive advantage in the agri-food sector.

    The state boasts of rich a agricultural land. About 200,000 hectares of the land are fadama land, mainly on the flood plains of the Rima and Niger valleys.

    The rest is upland, where season cultivation by mainly small farmers dominate. Agriculture continues to dominate the state’s economy. It is also the largest contributor to the state’ s coffers. Farming is mostly based on indigenous techniques, using local inputs of seeds, family and animal labour and informal credits.

    Animal traction is used among the Kambari,Dukawa and Dakarkari. Indigenous forms of cultivation are, however, gradually giving way, as more farmers now use improved seed varieties, chemical fertiliser, formal credit facilities, ploughs and tractors. Due to migration of family members, indigenous forms of farm labour also are gradually being replaced by hired labour. Some farmers rear cattle, sheep and goats to augment their income.

    These animals are fed with the stalk of grains, and leaves of legumes.For the most part, animals are grazed in the open field around the village and in the fadamas. Animal wastes are in turn used to manure the field. Therefore, some form of mixed farming is practised. Most animal rearing is done by the Fulani who oscilate from north to south.

    There are nine forest reserves in Kebbi, and there are pockets of ‘natural’ forests in the south and southeast,which yield forest resources such as wood, thatches, fruits as well as being sanctuaries for wildlife.

    Already, the forests in the riverine areas of the state are exploited for wood, used in boat building at Yauri, while in the other parts of the state (around Zuru), the people use the wood in carving mortars, pestles and handles of various implements like hoes and knives.

    Existing forest resources are, however, undersevere threat by animal grazing, bush burning and sourcing for fuelwood. These have caught the t attention of the Kebbi State Ministry of Agriculture, and Natural Resources, the Kebbi State Afforestation Programme (KSAP) and the Kebbi State Environmental Protection Agency (KSEPA).

    These agencies have pushed through various edicts to curtail the wanton destruction of forest resources. Furthermore, they have undertaken campaigns to improve the quality and number of forest reserves in the state.

    Kebbi has abundant livestock which include cattle, sheep, goats, camels, horses, donkeys, pigs and poultry. A survey of livestock potential in the state.

    The state ranks among the five with the highest number of livestock. It exports quite a substantial number to other parts of the country.

    The importance of livestock in the economy of the state can be deduced from the number of slaughtered yearly. It is estimated that about 110,000, 152,000 and 211,000 cattle, sheep and goats are slaughtered yearly in the state. Thus hides and skins are an important livestock subsector.

    The government has invested N1.6 billion in the IFAD-assisted Community-Based Agricultural and Rural Development Programme (CBARDP) in the last three years. The programme is being financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), with the federal, states and local government providing counterpart contribution.

    The programme has helped youths to be self-employed by providing them with water pumping machines and boreholes to irrigate their crops. An improved variety of cowpea and millet have been introduced to the beneficiaries by the Institute for Agricultural Research, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), in collaboration with International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan,with a view to attracting buyers from Niger Republic.

    The programme gave farmers improved varieties on cowpea and millet,which they call ‘wanke- IFAD’ and ‘dawa-IFAD’. The farmers tried it and found it to be high-yielding and they have abandoned the old variety.

    It has also boosted crop and livestock production with the provision of improved seeds and work bulls, among other support, he said. The focus of the government is to promote greater agricultural productivity, strengthen early warning and response systems and improve livelihoods.

    To achieve these, the government works to facilitate the necessary changes in the agricultural sector and facilitate the transfer of best practices and technologies.