United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and six southwestern States have forged a strong partnerships to tackle the menace of the out of school in the region.
UNICEF and the State Governments made the commitment in Ibadan, Oyo state capital during a two-day regional stakeholders’ meeting on Out-of-School Children and Retention, Transition and Completion Model for Ekiti, Ondo, Lagos, Osun, Oyo and Ogun States.
Speaking at the event, UNICEF Chief of Lagos Field Office, Mohammed Okorie, said 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 in education has become an albatross on the neck of the region that must be urgently addressed.
This, he, said required that the six states’ governments 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 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.
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She noted that reduction in the rate of the out of school children and retention, transition and completion are achievable should the governments expand access to secondary education, enhance quality learning and strengthen support systems through the implementation of workable policy, budgeting and set up plans.
Menkiti who advocated for more funding to be allocated to the education sector, especially secondary education, urging the governments to stop treating it as a second fiddle to the advantage of basic and tertiary education.
She said increased budgetary allocation for secondary education would not only significantly reposition the sector, which had suffered neglect in terms of critical infrastructures, equipment, low quality of teachers, leading to the alarming rate of the out of school children.
Corroborating Menkiti’s submission, Mr Babagana Aminu,an education specialist in UNICEF said that retention of school children had been one of the 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.
He said: “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.
The event was attended by the six states’ Commissioners for Education, Chairman of State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), religious leaders, and top civil servants.