|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Home Grown School Feeding programme initiative, which was part of the Buhari-led government’s N500 billion worth social intervention programmes, in the 2017 budget, was designed to improve access at the basic education level.
Whilst some Nigerians and experts say it is unsustainable because rather than design a social intervention that dignifies and improves the economic wellbeing of the parents, the programme targets pupils.
Bolanle Victoria, owner of Twitter handle @bolaNLee_c, in a tweet, captures this sentiment in clear terms “You don’t need to feed our wards with billions under the pretense of school feeding programme! Just increase our salaries, protect the farmers from herdsmen attack, provide jobs, project Nigerian goods to investors and reduce fuel price. And leave us to feeds our children ourselves.”
On another level, those who agree the target audience is appropriate think the Home Grown School Feeding programme has had mixed results.
On October 23, 2017, a video alleging that public primary school pupils in states covered under the school feeding programme were poorly fed went viral on the internet. The video sparked a lot of controversy with Nigerians labelling the feeding exercise a huge scam, while organisers of the programme maintained that the video was fake.
BusinessDay correspondent’s undercover investigation in 10 public primary schools in five states (South, East, West, North represented) of the federation benefitting from the feeding programme, however, shows that criticisms against the programme are not in any way unfounded.
Over the past few decades, Nigeria has made great strides in improving access to education. Nigerian children are starting school earlier and staying in school longer than they ever have before.
But Africa’s most populous nation has made relatively little progress in improving educational quality and learning outcomes.
Education data report published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in February 2016 shows that the country had 62,406 public primary schools in 2014 with a total enrolment of 23 million children. These schools have 574,579 teachers, resulting in an average teacher to student ratio of 1 to 40 comparable to what obtains in most parts of Africa but twice higher than what obtains in Europe and America and even most parts of Asia.
The high student teacher ratio means that most students in these classes are not getting enough attention from teachers, since the classes are overcrowded. This poor attention is compounded by the fact that only 11 percent of teachers in public primary schools actually have an educational degree while 56 percent have the minimum National Certificate of Education (NCE). The remaining 33 percent of teachers have other undefined qualifications.
This shows that besides the fact that majority of Nigeria’s future generation are studying in overcrowded classrooms, many of the teachers imparting knowledge into them do not have the qualifications that will guarantee that they can get the best education on offer.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
