In this interview with REGIS ANUKWUOJI on the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) International Education Day, the Education Specialist, UNICEF Enugu Field Office, Agatha Nzeribe, explained the focus of Enugu Field Office for the year. Excerpts:
What does international education day mean to your organisation?
You know UNICEF is working for the welfare and interest of children and women, and Education is the right of every child. Therefore, as far as there is a child that does not have access to schooling, is not able to have desirable learning outcomes, UNICEF is here waiting for that child.
What is the theme of this year’s international education Day?
This year’s theme is ‘invest in people, prioritise education’; prioritise education, reach out to those who have the need.
What actually is your organisation looking at this year?
This year, we want to look at how to reduce the number of out-of-school children and not just reduce the number it is important we improve the learning outcomes of the children.
In Enugu Field Office, we have eight states under it which include the five Eastern states, Cross River, Kogi and Benue and in the zone the matter of learning outcome has implicated school attendance for boys. In many of the states in our zone, the boys are asking why they should be going to school to spend many years when they cannot get a job after years of schooling; it is a very big challenge and the UNICEF concern is to keep improving learning outcomes, by expanding the quality of early child education, skilling up foundation literacy programmes.
Do you have special areas to be focusing on?
Yes. Enugu Field Office would be focusing on offering digital skills. National learning passport is the focus for this year from the education department; we are now going to help the government to increase domestic spending on education. to ensure we meet the 20 percent global benchmark by 2030 to address the infrastructural and teaching backlog that are affecting in all children success to inclusive and quality education.
The education section of UNICEF this year has chosen to focus on Digital literacy, that is Digital learning and it has been found that if children are introduced to digital learning, it will deal with the issue of access and quality all at once.
What actually is the place of education based on the 2021 Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey (MICs)?
At a glance within sub-Saharan Africa, 89 percent of our children do not have access to a computer at home and 82 percent of them lack internet access; driving it home only 55 percent of Nigerians have access to electricity, and of course, it differs between the rural and Urban areas, and most of our population are in the rural areas. So, there is a huge gap of about 80 percent between the Urban and rural areas where we have the majority of the children because when you are talking about digital learning, you are talking about computers and electricity. So right now only 36 Percent of the Nigerian population use the internet, 37 percent living in rural areas versus 60 percent in urban areas are connected through mobile internet only these are challenges to digital learning but to address the gap was an existing national policy on Education 2014 and the policy states that the government shall encourage, regulate, strengthen the open distance education practice in Nigeria. Digital learning is a modernised version of distance learning that was used after the war where people used correspondence to make their papers and certificates. In digital learning, a child in a rural area can have access to quality learning through the net by having a handset; so Nigeria wants to do that, in addition to that Nigeria has also developed a national policy on ICT in Education 2019, and this policy provides guidance on how to provide teaching, learning, research administration for ICT integration in Education.
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UNICEF has developed a digital learning policy by supporting the government of Nigeria develop a digital learning policy and the good thing was that the learning passport has been adopted, it is a digital learning platform for the Nigerian context, it is hosted on the federal ministry of education web, UNICEF has supported the digitisation of 15000 curricula in all core areas, from primary 1to 6 and JS1 To 3. This is big.
UNICEF Enugu Field Office had supported Enugu, Benue and Cross River states to train their teachers on how to use the national learning passport and how to access it and that it can easily be downloaded, just like you download other packages and whatever subject area one wants to deal with you are free.
“We supplied Enugu State 440 tablets and Benue 660 tablets last year to give to some schools, we have built the capacity of 30,500 teachers on the deployment of this technology in the classroom and so far 12 million people across the 16 states in Nigerian have registered, we are hoping to create more awareness.
Do you intend to work with private organisations?
We are working at engaging the private partners, Airtel is supporting us; they provided us with sims which we install in tablets that we issue to schools. We prioritise education, we have barriers but digital learning is a quick one because it reaches children in hard-to-reach areas, and it reaches children in difficult circumstances,
