Nigeria is failing to prepare about 70 percent of its population who are below 30 years of age for jobs and skills of the future, due largely to obsolete education curricula.
Africa’s most populous nation ranked 25 out 26 countries on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) human capital optimisation index for Africa, coming in only before Chad, a country that has been destabilised by civil unrest since 2008.
The World Economic Forum’s Human Capital Index, which measures the extent to which countries and economies optimise their human capital through education and skills development and its deployment throughout the life-course, finds that Sub-Saharan Africa, on average, currently only captures 55 percent of its full human capital potential, compared to a global average of 65 percent, ranging from 67 to 63 percent in Mauritius, Ghana and South Africa, to only 49 to 44 percent in Mali, Nigeria and Chad.
“This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following developments in Nigeria’s education space. For starters, since I graduated from the University of Ibadan, over 30 years, little has changed in the curriculum used to educate teachers and the quality of education and human capital development reflect the quality of teachers” said Folashade Adefisayo, principal consultant at Leading Learning Ltd, an education consulting firm, based in Lagos.
In a report titled ‘The Future of Jobs and Skills in Africa,’ the WEF highlighted four particular areas for strategic focus, which include: “ensuring the ‘future-readiness’ of curricula, especially through a focus on Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields; investing in digital fluency and ICT literacy skills; providing robust and respected technical and vocational education and training (TVET); and creating a culture of lifelong learning, including the provision of adult training and up skilling infrastructure” the Forum wrote in the report cited above.
The greatest long-term benefits of ICT intensive jobs in Africa are likely not to be in the lower-skilled delivery of digital products or services but in digital design, creation and engineering. To build a pipeline of future skills, Africa’s educators should design future-ready curricula that encourage critical thinking, creativity and emotional intelligence, as well as accelerate acquisition of digital and STEM skills to match the way people will work and collaborate in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“Education is the best economic policy in modern economies. Any country that has most its of workforce engaged in low skill, low income economic activity reaps low productivity and cannot be competitive in today’s digital, globalised economy. This boils down to the quality, nature and delivery of education from the very basic level to the very top” said Obiageli Ezekwesili at an education convention, April 20, in Lagos.
At the basic level, figures from the United Nations Children Education Fund (UNICEF) show that 40 per cent of Nigerian children aged 6-11 do not attend any primary school, with the Northern region recording the lowest school attendance rate, particularly for girls.
“Despite a significant increase in net enrollment rates in recent years, it is estimated that about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school,” according to UNICEF on its website. This means these children who are out of school are not being given a chance to compete in the future.
“Even when children enrol in schools, many do not complete the primary cycle. According to current data, 30 percent of pupils drop out of primary school and only 54 percent transit to Junior Secondary Schools. Reasons for this low completion rate include child labour, economic hardship and early marriage for girls” says UNICEF.
In addition, Nigeria is not keeping pace with these significant technology-dependent learning developments. The ability to use computers effectively has become an essential part of everyone’s education. Skills such as bookkeeping, clerical and administrative work, stocktaking, and so forth, now constitute a set of computerised practices that form the core Information Technology skills package: spreadsheets, word processors, and databases.
“The adoption and use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in schools have a positive impact on teaching, learning, and research.
Despite the roles ICTs can play in education, schools in Nigeria have yet to extensively adopt them for teaching and learning,” wrote Esharenana Adomi, department of Library and Information Science and Emperor Kpanghan, department of Science Education, both of Delta State University, Abraka, in a research paper.
The duo added “efforts geared towards integration of ICT into the school system have not had much impact. Problems such as poor policy and project implementation strategies and limited or poor information infrastructure militate against these efforts.”
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
