President Goodluck Jona¬than, on Tuesday, decried dearth of data on the edu¬cation sector, particularly at the primary and sec¬ondary school levels.
Speaking at the opening ses¬sion of the ongoing 20th Nigerian Economic Summit (NES#20), which began yesterday in Abuja, the Presi¬dent said data had become a major challenge as government tried to navigate solutions to present decadence in the nation’s educa¬tion sector.
The President also said the policy on education sector, which was agreed on as far back as 1969, was outdated and needed to be re¬viewed in order to determine rele¬vance and fine-tune its adaptability to national objectives, especially in the 21st Century.
This year’s summit, co-organised by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) and Federal Govern¬ment, has the theme,’Transforming education through Partnerships for Global Competitiveness.”
But beyond the education sector, poor data remains a major challenge to the entire Nigeria’s system, as questions are often asked around the credibility of statistics churned out most of the time.
Worrisome still are some gov¬ernment actions that suggest lack of seriousness in ensuring quality data generation for effective planning.
BusinessDay learnt, for instance, that provision of data generation for the National Bureau of Statistics was cut by as much as 40 percent in 2014 budget, being considered by the National Assembly. It was also gathered that the Nigeria’s data bureau, most times, was unable to carry out critical surveys due to funding issues.
“Let me reiterate that accurate statistics on our school enrolment and other education indices, espe¬cially at the basic and secondary school levels, remain a very serious challenge.
“It is necessary that we get the number right to aid successful planning and design making,” the President told participants at the summit.
But Jonathan, who was repre¬sented at the event by Vice Presi¬dent Namadi Sambo, reassured on government’s political will to re¬vamp the nation’s education system.
He said the assurance had be¬come necessary because statistics on the failure rate of school leav¬ing examinations and its relations to mastery of learning outcomes at the basic education level called for serious concern, and urged the summiteers to provide his admin¬istration with practical solutions in these specific areas.
In his opening address, President
Jonathan said the theme of the con¬ference was timely, especially at this time that government was more determined to tackle the challenges facing the education system.
According to him, the summit keys into plans to restructure key institutions and sectors of the economy for increased efficiency, global competitiveness and invest¬ment appeals.
Education remains the key sec¬tor for fast tracking the nation’s de¬velopment as there is urgent need to develop human capital by investing in the people, he noted, and charged the summit to take up this challenge and design an education system that will satisfy the national need and aspirations.
He also noted that the govern¬ment strongly welcome a strong de¬sire
by the private sector and other stakeholders to participate actively in the delivery of education, say¬ing that in this regard government was interested in building stronger partnership in designing credible accountability framework that will help improve quality in the nation’s education system.
“Government is forging partner¬ships with other stakeholders in order to invigorate the education sector and also encourage intra-sectoral partnership with the pri¬vate sector, voluntary organisations and the development partners,” the President told the audience.
He said looking ahead into the future, “the concerns should be about how to strengthen and sus¬tain the success of our intervention efforts,” as there were also concerns
