‘We want to tackle special learning disability challenge affecting Nigerian students’

As part of its strategic commitment to tackle the growing unreported cases of special learning disability affecting millions of students in Nigeria, Dyslexia Nigeria has opened its first training and screening center in Lagos.

The center is out to screen children and train teachers to recognise dyslexia so they can remediate dyslexia in schools where they will have the opportunity to make the difference.

Adrienne Tikolo, Director of Dyslexia Nigeria while speaking at the official opening of the training center described dyslexia as a special learning disability that affects the skills for reading, writing and spelling of 20 per cent of the population of any country.

Tikolo, observe that considering the population of Nigeria which is about 180 million, there are about 36 million dyslexics in Nigeria and quite a high number of that falls between the age range of 0 to 10 years.

According to her, “98 percent of teachers have never even heard of Dyslexia in Nigeria; they don’t know what dyslexia is”.

She further said that the center can train about 30 teachers and would also be embarking on an in-service training of teachers in their schools.

“We have different training facilities so what we can do is that we have in-service training where we go to schools to train teachers there; we also do onsite training”

“The first thing is to let the teachers identify the dyslexics in the classroom so that we can screen the child for dyslexia, and we begin to do something”, she said.

Tikolo opines that the center is unique in the sense that it not only screens a child for the dyslexia, it can design a programme that will work for the child.

Asked where she sees the centre in the next five years Tikolo said, “In the next five years, I expect that we will have more centres like this around the country. We will go from here to other parts of Lagos so that we can reach teachers”.

 

KELECHI EWUZIE