Education
MALALA Fund Advocacy Manager Femi Aderibigbe has called on government at all levels to do more to improve the quality of education that would reduce the number of out-of-school children.
He made the call on Tuesday in Abuja in a training on “Change Reporting Media Fellowship on Gender Responsive Education Planning” organised to develop journalists’ skills.
He also emphasised the importance of funding education as critical to human capital development.
According to him, the training is co-organised by the fund two civil society organisations to build the capacity of 27 journalists across the country with the resources needed to hold the government accountable in the education sector.
He said that programme would develop the skills of journalists to focus on measurable impact and issue-based reports along with the ethics of journalism to create credible stories in the sector.
“We need to speak against issues that prevent girls from accessing education up to senior secondary school.
“You can do a random sampling to ask how many children are out of education at the senior secondary level. I am not sure most of us can speak to data on the issues that we have.
Most times, we speak about basic education forgetting that a higher number of out-of-school children exist at the senior secondary school level,” Aderibigbe said.
Aderibigbe noted that the country provided free education, that is, Universal Basic Education for nine years and what that meant was that it invested in its children up to the stage where they were to make career decisions and then withdrew funding.
He said many people made their career decisions much later in life and not at the end of their junior secondary school level where free education stopped.
Aderibigbe called for a review of the government policy on UBE stressing the need to improve funding as it is connected to human capital development and economic prosperity of the nation.
Also, the founder of one of the partnering civil society organisations System Strategy and Policy Laboratory, Dr Murtala Mohammed, urged the fellows to base their reporting on evidence-based verifiable data and adhere to best practices in journalism.
He stressed the importance of good and qualitative education, adding that the state governments had to prioritise education in line with sustainable development goal four.
Mohammed, however, called on all the states to develop state education sector plans that will be gender-responsive to address some of the issues bedevilling the sector.
The two-day training will be held in Abuja from June 24 to June 25.
Malala Fund is an international, non-profit organisation that advocates for girls’ education.(NAN)
F.A
June 25, 2024
