To the private sector, the challenges in basic education are worrisome. Many firms have initiated projects to tackle these problems, to no avail. They are now considering coming together to end the challenges, reports KOFOWOROLA BELO-OSAGIE.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities mean a lot to private companies. Research shows that a greater percentage of firms choose to invest CSR funds in uplifting education in various ways. They build classrooms, buy furniture, equip laboratories, rehablitate libraries, donate boreholes, sports equipment and school buses, organise competitions in which they give out prizes, train teachers, give scholarships, and the like, and publice their activities perhaps to get good brand mileage.
However, firms are being challenged to join in a fight that may not give them obvious credit. They are being asked to collaborate in an effort to lift basic education out of the doldrums.
To this end, the Oando Foundation, collaborating with the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), hosted representatives of several private companies with vibrant CSR activities at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Ikeja, to discuss how to make this happen.
Present at the high profile meeting were representatives of Sterling Bank, Lafarge, PWC, Axxela, Sahara Energy, Nigeria Breweries Plc, DFID, Awa Foundation, Ikeja Electric, LearnAfrica, FCMB, Dufil Prima Foods, NBC, Malala Foundation, and United Nations Information Centre which responded to a call by Oando Foundation for a collective effort towards lifting basic education.
The picture painted by UBEC Executive Secretary Dr Hamid Bobboyi, and the Ogun State Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Mrs Modupe Mujota, as well as the Head, Oando Foundation, Ms Adegoke Adekanla, about the state of basic education was grim.
Bobboyi said the country faced a huge challenge reducing the number of out-of-school children from between 8.7 million and 10.5 million – the highest in the world.
He spoke about poor quality teachers who are poorly paid, inadequate and poor infrastructure for many pupils, poor funding of basic education by states, and poor data collection practices which affect planning, among others.
“The Northeast and the Northwest have 58 per cent and 51 per cent of their pupils, who never attended or attend only religious schools. The Almajiri, Migrant Communities and GirlChild phenomenon, Boko Haram and killer herdsmen also affect the number of children in school,” he said.
Lamenting the crisis in the basic education sub-sector, Bobboyi added: “Pupils go to school, but are they learning. We have to force students to take education as a course in the university. As a result, you have people who are not committed to teaching in our schools. In countries that take education serious, they pay the best students to go to teach.
“But what we have here is that governors use teaching as a political reward – they send people who helped them win elections to Local Government Chairmen to employ as teachers. So, you find those failed secondary school certificate exam teaching in primary schools.”
Speaking on the challenges in her state, Mrs Mujota said Ogun State public schools had great infrastructural deficits, which the government was working hard to address.
She said while private schools complement public education well at primary level, at secondary level, public schools struggle with overpopulation – with some classrooms having over 100 children in SS1.
“We have about 1,563 primary schools in Ogun State that are public sector-led versus 3,725 documented private primary schools that cater to about 646,000 children while the public just shy of 544,000 I believe. But that dynamic changes at secondary school level. We have 475 secondary schools that cater to almost half a million kids whereas their private sector counterparts that are more in number do only about 200,000 children. It poses a number of challenges. We had a programme, Exco in the Classroom, in which members of the State Executive Council visited public schools to teach. A school had 18 arms of SS1 and, in my class, there were over 105 children.
“The government decided to rehabiliate infrastructure, but we found that a lot of infrastructure were 40 to 60 years old. We embarked on a new project to build model colleges. We plan to build 30 such schools. Seven are at various stages of completion and one is fully running,” she said.
She also spoke about inadequate furniture and toilets.
Reeling out some statistics about the dire straits of basic education, Ms Adekanla said: “Over 40 per cent of primary school teachers in Nigeria are unqualified; 10.5 million out-of-school children represented 14 per cent of the world’s population of out of school children; children under 15 make up 44 per cent of Nigeria’s rising population; 20 of 22 million Nigerian children aged 0-3 do not have access to early childhood education. She also said over 58.3 per cent of pupils in Nigerian schools are not learning effectively, while 50 per cent of Grade Six pupils cannot read at all according to UNICEF.
She identified “bureaucracy, poor coordination, lack of transparency, multilateral education agencies and politicisation of education’’ as some of the challenges facing education.
Ms Adekanla said though expending significant resources into education, the efforts of organised private sector firms could not be said to be sustainable because of poor synergy and a lack of awareness by the government of their efforts.
She said coming together as a coalition, the private sector would be able to strategically engage with basic education managers; improve participation of private sector in basic education delivery, and even get a voice that could be heard internationally for the benefit of education in Nigeria.
“There is a global business coalition on education. What they have come together to do, beyond their own interventions, is to decide what should finance look like in an emergency. For instance, Google says it would provide internet access to any school anywhere in an emergency.
“In forming a group of private sector organisations in Nigeria intervening in basic education, we should be able to demand what global attention is being given to. We should be able to go to the government to ask: ‘What do you want us to do to intervene in teacher training?’” she said.
Challenges working as a group
Despite the gains of coming together as a group, some at the meeting raised concerns about its effectiveness and operations.
While some participants said there was a similar coalition of private sector actors in education, the private sector advisory group (organised around the Sustainable Development Goals), in existence and starting a new group could be duplication of effort, others wondered whether Oando Foundation would lord it over other firms that would equally contribute money towards achieving the joint objective. There were also concerns about how the secretariat would be run and funded, where meetings would hold, and the like.
However, Mrs Mujota urged the private sector firms to set their differences aside and work as a group for the common goal of lifting the education sector, which she said was what mattered.
She said it was in the interest of the private sector to intervene as the schools were the factories where their future workforce was being prepared. She warned that failure to do so could result in negative results where the society would not be safe because the children of the poor who have been denied quality education would rise against the more fortunate children of the rich who got privileged education.
Bobboyi said collaboration was key. He said UBEC could support private sector firms to complete projects they take on.
On his part, the Chairman, Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board, Dr Ganiyu Sopeyin, underscored the need for firms to do a needs-based assessment before committing funds to projects that may not be appreciated.
“We were at a meeting to come up with a policy paper on how education can be supported by other stakeholders. But there are needs assessments to be done. It is good that we want to support but we must first know the areas we need to support.We have people coming to us that they want to support but when we tell them we do not need what they want to offer, they go away. They need to ask what is needed first,” he said.
Oando Foundation volunteered to host the secretariat and start the ground work for the running of the coalition, while PWC volunteered to help coordinate the baseline data needed to make meaningful progress.
At the end of the day, DFID, Sterling Bank, Awa Foundation and Lafarge pledged to host the meetings that would follow on moving the coalition forward.
Ms Maurice Atoki, a senior manager at PWC, said it was better private sector came together to achieve greater success.
“For one it is the opportunity to scale impact for greater good. If private sector comes together – right now there are individual contributions and commitment – but if they come together for that genuine reason from where it is to where it should be, there is a tendency that they will impact more.
“If initially they were impacting 10,000 on an annual basis, we think if three companies come together, they can do like 50,000 and like that so that the scale is higher.
“We are all here talking about the magnitude of the issues. The issues will not reduce if we still have population issues.Because what happens is that when a company accustomed to helping a thousand children does the same thing every year, and there is a multiplier effect on the population, those thousands are being replaced. It means that that company is not doing anything. We need to identify the increasing nature of the problem itself and together we need to see how we can solve it,” she said.
