64% of Nigerian children lack access to early childhood education ― UNICEF
Editor
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said that 64 per cent of Nigerian children between 0 and five years of age do not attend Early Childhood Education (ECE), which UNICEF said is a critical foundation for all forms of child learning experiences.
UNICEF Education Specialist Yetunde Oluwatosin, made this known Thursday in Sokoto at a two-day media dialogue on ECE in Nigeria organised by the Child Rights Information Bureau (CRIB) of the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture in partnership with Children’s Fund.
She said that globally one in three children are enrolled in pre-primary education, but in Nigeria, only 36 per cent of children attend early childhood education, which accounts for one in every three children.
Quoting the Personnel Audit (NPA) report conducted by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) in 2018, Oluwatosin said that there is a wide disparity between rich families accounting for 78 per cent attendance and children from poor households where only 8 per cent attend early childhood education.
She said the situation is worsened because there is low public spending on early childhood education in spite of the huge benefits for child development and the nation’s economic growth. “At least over 10 million school-age children are not enrolled in Nigeria.
She said that with the current statistics, Nigeria is far from achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She also listed some of the barriers to early childhood education to include lack of data for effective planning, lack of infrastructure and limited play-based facilities within the school environment as well as a shortage of trained teachers to handle early learners.
“From the NPA report, Nigeria has over 7 million learners in early childhood education to 154,000 available teachers.
“This pupils/teachers ratio is low, and we must do something to improve this. This disparity is there, and we are still far behind in achieving the SDG goals,” she said.
She urged the federal government to take steps to reposition early childhood education in Nigeria to make it a strong and resilient national system in development and humanitarian context.
UNICEF communications specialist, Dr Geoffrey Njoku, charged the Nigerian media to create space for issues relating to children. He said that ECE remains the bedrock of a child’s development and that attention must be focused on ensuring that children are exposed to learning at an early stage for proper brain development.
He also noted that now that politicians are campaigning for the 2023 general elections, candidates should be able to tell Nigerians what they plan to do to address the concerns about the rights of children, one of them is the issue of early childhood education that is not given adequate attention in the country.
The representative of the Federal Ministry of Education, however, said the federal government in recognition of the importance of early childhood education approved five per cent of the two per cent Consolidated Revenue Fund allocated to UBEC, to fund the one-year pre-primary education in Nigeria.
She further said that even as education is on the concurrent list, the federal government could only intervene while providing the necessary impetus for the development of early childhood education in Nigeria, including a robust play-based curriculum, which has been developed by the Nigeria Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) in collaboration with UNICEF.
The Country Director of Early Childhood Development Initiative (ECDI) in Nigeria, Dr Amy Panyi, said there was the need to promote early childhood education to open up a world for children where everything is possible.
The Director, Early Child Education, Sokoto State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Faruk Umar, disclosed that the only state in Nigeria to establish a full-fledged department of Early Childhood Education is Sokoto state, adding that the state has over 500 ECE centres in some public schools.