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Educational challenges in Nigeria EU_DEV_DAYS
- 1. Educational Challenges in Nigeria The UNESCO perspective…
- 3. Zooming in on priority areas
- 4. ACCESS 10.5 million children are out of school Net enrollment has declined in the past decade Percentage of children in school: Nigeria 58% Regionally 76%
- 5. LITERACY 35 million adults cannot read or write 64% are females
- 6. EQUITY Retention for children who start school is relatively good… BUT children from very poor families generally do not even enter school 93% vs. 30% Children from poor families who do attend school tend to start late and increases their probability of dropping out 14% vs. 42% Average education spending per child by the richest 20% of households in Nigeria is more than ten times higher than spending by the poorest 20% of households
- 7. QUALITY Males: After six years of schooling, 28% were illiterate and 39% were semi-literate Females: 32% illiterate and 52% semiliterate
- 8. TROUBLING GAPS ACROSS LINES OF: Class Geography Gender
- 9. Class / Geography / Gender Nearly all children of rich families go to school… BUT only 26% of girls from poor families the North-West region do.
- 10. Class / Geography / Gender Percentage of 7-16 year olds who have NEVER been to school in Nigeria
- 12. Proven capacity to reach the “unreached”
- 13. Practical
- 15. Benefits learners and teachers alike
- 16. Fosters new forms of collaboration
- 17. Offers solutions for resource poor schools
- 19. Mobile Learning Week 17-21 February 2013 Paris, France
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon.My name is Mark West. I’m a project officer for UNESCO, the lead United Nations agency for education. I currently help oversee field projects in Nigeria and other countries in West Africa. I will be providing a brief overview of some the most urgent education challenges facing Nigeria. During the panel discussion to follow, I hope to have an opportunity to explain how my organization is working to reconcile some of these challenges, both through public-private partnerships and by leveraging widely-owned mobile technologies. As we all know, educational interventions begin with needs and they happen in specific contexts. It is vital then that we understand the contours of these needs and the particularities of the contexts in which we work. It is only from this starting point that efforts to improve education can be successful. We are fortunate to have some Nigeria experts in this room—the Governor of the Edo State, Mr. Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, first among them—so if I overlook anything, please let me know.
- As you may know, UNESCO tracks educational progress against six goals, known as the Education for All goals. These internationally agreed upon objectives ask countries to:Increase the number of children enrolled in pre-primary school educationEnsure that all children have access to free and compulsory primary educationEnsure young people and adults have relevant learning opportunities beyond primary schoolEradicate illiteracy, in both the youth and adult populationsEliminate gender disparity in educationAnd 6) improve the overall quality of educationSince UNESCO began measuring progress against these goals in 1999, the results, as this chart illustrates, have been frustratingly mixed in Nigeria.While there have been gains in a few areas, they have been modest at best. But more troubling there has been backsliding. In some areas, the educational challenges facing Nigeria have become more severe and more urgent than they were a decade ago. First let’s look at the gains: 1st Literacy has improved somewhat, particularly for adults. 2nd More students are receiving early childhood care and education. 3rd Teacher-student ratios have improved but, remember, that this is purely a numerical ratio and says nothing about the quality of learning.4th More students are in secondary school than there were in the past.5th There is better gender equity at the primary school level.While this demonstrates progress, it is, I want to underscore, slow progress. Many developing countries have progressed both faster and further against these targets, including many of Nigeria’s neighbors.Unfortunately, this is not the end of the bad news. There are also areas where there have been declines, instead of gains. It is rare for a country to backtrack, so these areas deserve special attention: 1st Today there are 3 million more students out of primary school in Nigeria than there were in 1999. And 2nd Education remains unequal across lines of gender, particularly at the secondary level.
- That chart we just saw in the previous slide can be a big hard to digest at all once, so I want to focus in on priority areas identified by UNESCO. Now that we’ve seen the big picture, the panoramic view so to speak, let’s look more closely at four areas: access, literacy, equity, and quality.
- First is access.“Access” refers to the ability and means to GO to school.NEXTCurrently Nigeria has the largest number of out-of-school children in the world. If we took all the children on the planet who are not in school, one in every six would be Nigerian. To put this number in sobering perspective…-10.5 million is more than the entire population of Somalia. It’s more than the population of Sweden or Portugal. -Many of you flew to get here: On any given day, just over 2 million people fly on commercial airlines. So take all the people in airports from Rio to New York to Moscow to Dubai and then multiple this number times five and you have the number of children in Nigeria who do not presently have access to school education. This is a problem that must be rectified. NEXTThis is not just a population issue.Expressed as a percent, the number students attending primary school has declined by about 5 percentage points over the past decade. This is particularly troublingly because over the past decade the percentage of students in other Sub Saharan African countries attending primary school has increased dramatically. So comparatively this is bad news. In Nigeria only 58% of primary age children are not in school, compared with a regional average 76%.
- Another priority area is literacy. Put bluntly, illiteracy in Nigeria is rampant among the adult and youth population.While the percentage of people who are illiterate has declined in over the past decade, the number has actually increased in absolute terms due to a rapidly expanding population. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimates that there are 24 million more illiterate adults today than there were in the early 1990s.In absolute terms 8.6 million youth are illiterate and while this number—expressed as a percentage—has increased over the past decade, the gains have been modest at best.Regardless of age, illiteracy is more likely to impact females than males given this problem a gender dimension.
- Education in Nigeria is highly inequitable. First, we know school life in Nigeria is significantly better than regional averages. Students who start primary school usually finish and this is, of course, a good thing. (80% in Nigeria; 62% regionally)However… poor children, more often than not, never even begin school and this keeps drop out numbers artificially low. NEXTAny guesses what these numbers represent?93% of students from rich families start school30% of students from poor families start school NEXT About 1 in 4 children in the first grade are two years older than the official starting age.NEXTAny guesses what these numbers represent?14% of students from rich families start school late42% of students from poor families start school lateWhy is this a problem… because we know that within the context of Africa students who start school late, rarely stay with it. They tend to drop out and even if they remain in school they are significantly behind their peers who started school at a younger age.NEXTRich families spend far more on education than poor families, giving wealth students a serious advantage over poor students who face a host of other disadvantages. How much more. As a point of comparison, it is worth asking the parents in this room: Are you aware of any family that spends 10 times what you spend on the education of your child? Are you aware of any family that spends 10 times less on education than you spend? This discrepancy undermines the idea that education can be a leveler in society and provide fair opportunities to young people who may be disadvantaged in other ways.
- Now let’s look at quality. Unfortunately, here too the data paints an unflattering picture. Many students in schools aren’t learning.Similar numbers apply for mathematics skills This has numerous causes…It is a symptom of poorly equipped schools It is a symptom of poorly trained teachersIt is a symptom of poverty (cannot separate education from society at large)
- In Nigeria, a young person’s educational fate is tied less to ability that three factors over which young people have no control.NEXT Each factor can have a huge impact on a student’s ability or likelihood of getting an education.
- Let’s explore these gaps across lines of class, geography and gender more closely.READ SLIDE:Take a moment to read this slide again because it’s easy to forget what these numbers mean in human terms. This data comes from the most recent UNESCO figures available, so this is a right-here, right-now reality in Nigeria. In some regions of the country just one in every four girls is able to attend school.
- Lastly, I want to examine what might be best called a flowchart of privilege and disadvantage.To get our bearings look at the two poles:100% is BAD (100%, means 100% of young people have NEVER been to school)0% is GOOD (0% means ALL young people attend school)NEXTBeing rich in Nigeria carries major advantages regardless of gender and geography.NEXTBUT if you’re poor the situation is different: gender and geography matter enormously.To get a sense of the singular importance of class consider this: Almost all urban rich students enter lower secondary school, compared with less than half of the urban poor.NEXTGeography matters too. And so does gender. To get a sense of the staggering regional and gender divides in terms of access to education consider these two sobering facts:84% of the poorest girls aged 7-16 in the North-West have never attended school, compared to only 18% of children in the South-East.And nation-wide, a majority of girls from poor rural households have never been to school. From UNESCO’s standpoint… the pressing question is how do we help “this” girl (poor, rural, female). It’s not easy; there are no quick fixes. You’d be surprised how many interventions give a little extra help to “this” student (rich, urban, male).TIME ALLOWINGOur answer, given our limited size and budget, is mobile technology.
- Why mobile technology? It’s a good question and you’re right to be skeptical. There is, said bluntly, nothing ideal about using a small candy-bar phone to try to impart deep reasoning skills and foster critical thinking.So indeed… why mobiles?Because people have it. And sometimes even “that” girl we learned about in the previous slide (poor, rural and female) has a connected mobile phone or knows someone who does and is able to use it.
- If you don’t believe me this is a picture from Kiberia,the second largest slum in Africa, essentially nestled in Nairobi. Approximately 200,000 people live in this city within a city, usually without regular access to electricity or other basic resources.YET despite this, they not only have and use mobile phones, they are doing things with mobile devices that would seem cutting edge right here in Brussels. In Kiberia and basically everywhere else in Kenya you can buy virtually anything with mobile money.The system in Kenya is called M-Pesa and it is used by 15 million people in Kenya. NEXTThe building in the yellow circle houses an M-PESA agent who takes receipt and gives paper currency, making the M-PESA system work. At last count Kenya had 40,000 M-PESA agents. Mobile money is used to pay everything from electricity bills to school fees via a simple text-based menu that is accessible on virtually any mobile phone. The median transaction amount is 1USD.The take-away for education is twofold: Mobile devices have reached areas where educational opportunities are few and far between. People in developing countries have shown ingenuity using mobile devices for all sorts of purposes, including education. We have strong evidence of people living in areas without schools accessing educational games, texts, and myriad other learning resources from a mobile device that costs less than 30 Euros. UNESCO has teamed up with an organization called Worldreader, a company that makes books and stories freely accessible on inexpensive mobile phones. The number of people reading entire novels on phones that are probably similar to the phones you used in the 1990s is simply staggering. Some people are reading four or five 500 plus page books a month on the tiny screen of a Nokia handset. Is this a way to combat illiteracy and improve access to education? You bet it is.
- Why else is mobile technology promising for education in a place like Nigeria? Well it’s practical. By and large people already know how to use mobile devices and the touch screens are incredibly intuitive, as anyone who has a toddler and an iPad knows well. This is a picture of student at a school I visited in Kenya. He said he liked using a phone for learning because he could use it when looking after his younger brother and because it didn’t stop working when there was a power outage. He’s right, because mobile devices are mobile in a true sense of the word (and in a way laptops aren’t): with the right software and content mobile technology allows students to learn in environments that did not previously support learning… for example, while riding a bus or looking after animals. It can also power personalized learning because, in most instances, the device is individually owned. This boy can learn, say, a new language using a mobile device and move at his own pace because he has his own mobile phone.
- Why else is mobile technology useful for education?Because the barriers to innovate with and through mobile technologies are low.This is a picture of the mLab in Kenya, a single floor of an office building where local entrepreneurs are developing mobile companies, many of them catering to the education sector. The two men in the picture here (both in their 20s) built a mobile application to help people learn to read. It has been tailored for female students living North West of country, the poorest part of Kenya where close to 50% of females do not attend school. So these young men are building educational solutions for their fellow citizens and building a business while they do it. They have created a service for Kenyans and by Kenyans. And this can happen anywhere and there are similar innovation labs in Nigeria.
- Picture is of teachers participating in the UNESCO/Nokia project in Abuja. Mention what the project sends daily teaching tips and ideas for practical instructional activities directly to teachers phones. For education to be relevant it cannot ignore technology. While teachers are often portrayed as being fierce opponents of change and wed to the status quo, our experience has been quite the opposite. Teachers want instant access to communication and the largest cache of information civilization has ever known as much as anyone else, and they want it for their students. With a connected mobile phone a person in say, Enugu, Nigeria can go from having extremely limited access to educational resources, to having access to more resources than a single person could consume in an entire lifetime. This is a very big deal. The women in this picture had never had an opportunity to use a touchscreen phone and, more broadly, easy access the internet and its countless utilities and tools. These teachers didn’t oppose the technology or smirk that using a mobile phone was part of a corporate conspiracy to take over education. They were fired up to have a tool most people in this room take for granted. And if you don’t believe teachers will use mobile phones to build their capacity, our numbers tell a very different story. We launched our project with 50 teachers from 50 different schools in Abuja; we gave out only about 60 phones. Three months later… over 75,000 regular users. UNESCO’s position on educational technologies is clear: they can make teachers more effective, but certainly not replace them. Teaching is, at core, a deeply complex and deeply human act and I cannot imagine a world without human educators and, even if I could, it is not a world I would want to live in. Technology should empower teachers, not threaten them and this is exactly what we have observed in Africa.
- Many people think that mobile devices are isolating, but it certainly doesn’t have to be that way when it comes to education.Teachers in the UNESCO project have formed informal groups using What’s App, Facebook and Twitter. This is occurring organically without input from project organizers.True with students as well. Model doesn’t need to be a 1:1 ratio. Seeds of Empowerment.
- No electricity. Only a third of students had books. Teachers generally didn’t have access to professional development.Doesn’t need to be complicated… generally speakingsimple is best (lessons from Nigeria teacher project). We’ve noticed that in the context of developing countries straightforward SMS services are often the most effective.Can help bridge in-school and out-of-school learning in difficult settings. We know of teachers that give students quizzes and assignments on mobile devices because they don’t have access to paper or copy machines.