Nigeria Accenture Alumni at a recent event in December has urged the need for improvement in the Nigerian educational system.
The event which was graced by the presence of different stakeholders in the educational sector was on the need to re-imagine education for the fourth industrial revolution.
Niyi Yusuf, Managing director Accenture Nigeria told BusinessDay that education in the country has indeed been an issue in terms of the quality of teaching, access to education, number of students out of school, and poor infrastructure.
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In this light, the Accenture Alumni committee was set up to help in improving teaching quality, mentoring teachers and employing technology to transform teaching technique in schools.
At Accenture, we provide services as a fee on top profit companies. However, we see education as a social service.
Thus, since the average educational institution might not be able to afford the services of Accenture, we, however, feel that if can volunteer by going to the classrooms to teach, it will help a lot in sharing role models to the minds of young ones.
Hence, we have partnered with organisations such as Teach for Change, Teach for Nigeria and Slum to School to achieve this goal, Yusuf said.
BusinessDay analysis shows that Nigeria educational sector has been underfunded overtime below United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) standard of 26 per cent.
Budgetary allocation to education in Nigeria has been low. Recurrent expenditure N398.01 billion in the 2017 budget of N7.2 trillion represents 5.41 per cent of the total budget a reduction by 1 per cent from the 6.1 per cent allocated in 2016.
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Ghana allocates 23.1 per cent of its annual budget to education, which is second highest among Nigeria’s 10 neighbouring countries. Among the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) sub-region, Ghana ranks 2nd in terms of share of Government expenditure allocated to education after Cote d’Ivoire.
The three countries with the lowest shares are Liberia (12.1 per cent), Cape Verde (13.8 per cent) and Benin (15.9 per cent). In light of this, Nigeria is one of the nations in the ECOWAS sub-region that allocate the least to education.
In 2018, the total sum allocated to the sector is N605.8 billion, with N435.1 billion for recurrent expenditure, N61.73 billion for capital expenditure and N109.06 billion for the Universal Basic Education Commission.
This allocation is lower than the 7.4 per cent the government gave the education sector in the N7.4 trillion 2017 budget.
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Utibe Henshaw, CEO Education Partnership Centre in a panel discussion session at the event outlined some of the challenges faced in the education sector which includes issues of quality of the curriculum, issues of quality of our credit level, issues of learning outcome as the quality of education that children receive in school are poor.
Henshaw also added that we have the highest number of out of school children and about 60 per cent were women.
Furthermore, at the management level, we have our education on the concurrent educative list which makes it difficult to hold a particular group accountable for any flaws in the system.
Abolaji Osime CEO Global international college said that the Nigeria educational system has witnessed a bigger problem since the Federal government lowered the entry-level of teachers in our colleges of education to 100 over 400 as one need just as low as 25 per cent to become a teacher to teach great minds.
Amelia Dafeta HOS Corona School said one of the ways in solving the issues faced in our educational system, is by leveraging/adopting the use of homegrown technology. Also, by twinkling our curriculum to fit the required standard.
On the outlook for the educational sector, Yusuf said three major disruptions will happen in the educational sector in 2018.
There will be more use of technology in our educational system, more young ones will go into education because of technological development and attractiveness of the sector and there will be an inflow of private capital as we will see more private equity firms who are investing in the educational sector resulting to an expansion in infrastructural facilities
