…Broken education system threatens tomorrow’s jobs
At 16, Fola Adeleye spends his school days memorising Charles’s Law and solving equations using the ‘Almighty Formula’ by hand.
He dreams of becoming a robotics engineer, but at his government-owned secondary school in Sagamu, a town near Lagos in neighbouring Ogun State, the computer lab still runs on Windows XP, and the internet comes alive only when the school generator is powered.
“I know the jobs I dream of require coding and design skills,” he says, “but I’ve never written a single line of code in school.”
Adeleye’s frustration reflects the reality of many young students in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, where the education system struggles to keep pace with the growing demands of the 21st-century workforce.
Read also: Nigeria must lead to deliver on AU Continental Education Strategy
Experts say Nigeria will need to overhaul its national curricula to accommodate areas such as robotics, coding and automation from basic education, shift focus from theoretical teaching to skill-based learning, invest heavily on STEM education to attract more enrollment and improve teacher training and quality to build students for jobs that are yet to exist.
Over the past two decades, the country has embarked on a series of reforms to revise its outdated curriculum and align it with the demands of future jobs.
While the efforts have seen programme growth in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) increase by 45 percent, according to a 2023 report by the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council, they’re still not enough to meet the country’s developmental goals.
Poor STEM growth
In Nigeria, as in most of Africa, railway construction is dominated by the Chinese due to China’s large pool of engineers. A case in point is the 27 km Lagos Blue Line linking Okokomaiko to Marina in the heart of Nigeria’s commercial capital, which is being handled by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC).
Like its sub-Saharan African (SSA) peers, Nigeria requires approximately 2.5 million engineers to meet the demands of automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital transformation, according to the World Bank.
Despite this urgency, in Nigeria, like in most parts of Africa, STEM education is still limited, even after the nation published a National Policy on Science and Technology about seven years ago.
But experts like Azikiwe Peter Onwalu, a professor and acting president of the African University of Science and Technology, Abuja, argued that a state of emergency should be declared in the education sector.
“The sector is bedeviled with so many challenges, right from primary school. Even from preschool to the university level,” Onwalu said in an exclusive interview with BusinessDay, calling for a change in the curriculum to focus on the demands of the labour market.
Lack of entry-level skills
A 2022 report by Jobberman Nigeria revealed that over 45 percent of employers surveyed rated entry-level hires as lacking critical work readiness skills.
Similarly, the British Council’s ‘Future of Work’ study in West Africa found that while over 60 percent of tertiary graduates are eager to work, less than 25 percent possess the core competencies required by employers in a competitive economy.
Read also: Unpaid salaries, strikes derail Nigeria’s education goals
Onwalu however urged authorities to integrate industry-linked collaborations with higher institutions’ curriculum in order to equip students with the practical knowledge and skills required of them to become employable.
“We should begin to de-emphasise certificates, which are good, by the way, but in getting those certificates, you need skills, because that is what will eventually lead you to success,” the professor of Agricultural Engineering said.
“We need to restructure our educational system in such a way that it will produce graduates who can be self-sufficient, have skills, and can fit into the industry.”
The Nigerian government introduced a new basic education curriculum in October 2024 that includes 15 skills and trades such as plumbing, POP installation, event decoration and management, as well as GSM repairs and CCTV installation, but implementations have been largely stalled, especially in underserved communities.
Dearth of problem solvers
But many jobs in the future will need STEM skills. The World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts that 85 percent of jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. Most of these new jobs will need computer skills, engineering knowledge, and problem-solving abilities.
“Nigerian secondary schools teach 12 subjects, but not one on critical thinking, emotional intelligence, or financial literacy,” lamented Alex Onyia, CEO of Educare. “We’re producing exam champions, not problem solvers.”
Education experts say a national curriculum that includes science and technology knowledge such as robotics, artificial intelligence and coding, as practised in Rwanda, must be developed for students to remain competitive in the next decade.
“STEM and digital skills must take the centre stage,” said Sulaimon Okewole, CEO, Cardinal E-School. ”Early exposure to coding, artificial intelligence, and data science, which are supported by modern labs and e-learning tools, will make education more practical and aligned with technological advancements.”
Okewole noted that encouraging students to tackle real-world challenges as part of their coursework will bridge the gap between theory and practice, preparing them for the realities of the workplace.
Reworking the curriculum without improving the quality of teachers who are core drivers of the content of the teaching and learning process may be an effort in futility.
Onyia, cited earlier, said: “We are producing unprepared teachers to raise a generation we expect to compete globally.”
For him, improving the quality of education requires recruiting the best brains to teach with a minimum qualification of a master’s degrees and a second class upper division in first degree.
“Their starting salary should be N300,000, with a brand new car paid by the teacher over the years. Bi-annual license renewal with continuous training and certification exams should be mandatory,” Onyia wrote in a post on X.
Read also: From Theory to Practice: SkillUp bridges the gap in Nigeria education system
Technical education
To avert a looming skilled workforce shortage, technical education must be reimagined, experts say, explaining that Germany has been able to develop its small and medium enterprises due to its dual approach to education, which has seen it have the lowest youth unemployment rate in Eurozone economies.
While the Nigerian government has made commitments to incentivise students of technical college via payment of a N45,000 monthly stipend and allocation of about N120 billion to train not fewer than 650,000 youths in vocational and technical skills, experts fear implementation may be uneven.
Bola Sekoni, a lecturer at the Federal College of Education, Technical, Akoka, said beyond the strings of reforms to make technological education attractive, the government must embark on a policy to place value on certificates received after the training to ensure beneficiaries get well-paid jobs and recognition.
“It’s not enough to train students in vocational education. Efforts must be made to see that certification is duly recognised and trainees get jobs with decent pay. With that, youth unemployment will reduce and the economy will grow faster,” Sekoni told this reporter in a telephone call.
