NIGERIA’S EDUCATIONAL SECTOR – A RECAP

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Report for 2011, Nigeria has a literacy rate of 57% and sits below 140 in world literacy rankings. A very bad position, if you look at the countries that are ahead of Nigeria.  Despite Zimbabwe’s economic problems, it has a literacy rate of 91.9% and it is number 95 in the world. Despite great advances as reported by UNESCO and several government agencies towards better education, Nigeria still lags behind South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Equatorial Guinea, Lesotho and Libya. Botswana has a literacy rate of 77.7%, Cape Verde 83%, Ghana 64%, while Mali and South Sudan are at the bottom of the list of 183 countries with 26.2% and 27% respectively.

Buttressing this fact the United Nations Education and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2011 stated that, Nigeria has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world; it also reports that about 80 million adults in Nigeria are illiterate and the overall literacy rate is close to fifty-seven percent. Only about five hundred thousand people are enrolled in adult literacy classes nationwide which translates into one out of every 80 is an illiterate. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2012, also in its report, states that there are 30million primary school age children in Nigeria but an estimated 10 million are not enrolled in school.

The literacy rate is not a measurement of high level training and education. It simply measures the percentage of people with the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about the written word.

What are other African Nations Doing?

Soon after independence, Zimbabwe introduced free basic education. Students at university were paid allowances to sustain themselves while at university. This is what caused the significant gains in education that has kept the country’s literacy rate growing, even after having suffered from decade long economic problems.

The government of Equatorial Guinea does not invest much of its ‘oil dollars’ in education. Despite this, education is free and compulsory until the age of 14 which means that this country continues to achieve high levels of literacy. The country has also fought harder to improve the literacy of women and eliminate their marginalisation. The result has been a high literacy rate and a high level of parity between the literacy of men and women.

What’s Nigeria Doing Wrong?

Nigeria, has the continent’s largest population and it prides itself as having one of the most advanced economies in the continent, second only to South Africa, but its literacy rate still lags behind some of Africa’s troubled economies. It has invested billions of Naira in education but it still fails to achieve the expected result. It has a low rate of university attendance. Its school and university standards are too low with the exceptions of a few – mostly privately owned – that strive to meet international standards. Furthermore, university fees are too high for the poor majority. Only one in six students get into university and a third of those, drop out within a year.

Three million Nigerians aged 18-24, more than half the total, are outside education, training or employment. 70% of Nigerians have no qualifications at all. A paltry 17% of graduates are likely to get a job within a year of leaving school and 60% will still be jobless after 5 years. Officially, 25% of Nigerians are unemployed and actual unemployment is projected to be much higher than that.

The government owned universities academic staffs went into a prolonged nationwide strike which lasted for about five months in 2013, and primarily one of the grudge why the academicians are on strike is due to the poor standards of education, infrastructure and welfare at state schools. About 85% of state schools in Nigeria have been classified by the government as failing. The government, through a meeting with the president, has already promised reforms and investment in infrastructure, but it is a mammoth task for a government that has invested billions of Naira in education without achieving the intended results.

It is high time that Nigeria realises it is not a lot of money that changes the literacy rate, its how and where you invest that money.