United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said about 18 million Nigerian children from primary to junior secondary schools are out of school as a result of insecurity and incessant kidnapping in the last 10 years in the country.
The education manager Kano UNICEF field office, Michael Banda, said the insecurity challenge has impacted the quality of learning in terms of foundational literacy and the numeracy which he described as ‘really devastating’ stressing the need for a concerted effort by government in making the population more productive like India and China did.
Banda stated this in Kano during a meeting to commemorate the 10 years of abduction of 276 Chibok school girls organised with the sole aim of charting a way forward to having safe schools in the country.
He said since the abduction of Chibok girls in 2014, there have been an increase in attacks on schools as children feel unsafe going to school and parents insecure sending their wards to school.
He said, “It has impacted on learning quality, those who get to school sometimes close early to get home; children are not secure on their way to school and parents are not certain sending their children to school – this impacts the quality of learning and therefore you will see that in Nigeria in term of foundational literacy and the numeracy, one in three children are reaching the desirable outcome in literacy and the numeracy at 10 years old, so this is really devastating.”
On the impact on the community, he said, “Our parents cannot longer go freely tend to their fields, so food productivity gets affected as a result of insecurity. The social fabric of the community becomes insecure and negatively impacted”.
The meeting which was in collaboration with the Ministries of Higher Education from Kano, Jigawa and Katsina states also had in attendance students from various higher institutions from the three states.
In their various remarks at the meeting the trio, commissioners for higher education, Dr Isah Yusuf (Jigawa), Abdulhamid Ahmed (Katsina) and Dr Yusuf Kofarmata (Kano) pointed out that they have all beefed up security around schools in their various states to make the school environment safe for students.
Students who also spoke at the meeting advocated for improved security and solutions that would stand the test of time in safeguarding the lives of school children and students across all schools in Nigeria.
A final year student of the Bayero University Kano, Toyeeb Abdulsalam, urged government to recruit students across Nigerian schools to serve as undercover who will hint government on any security threats within and outside the school as they mingle easily with others, adding that before election government promised security of lives and properties, hence the need to act on what they have promised. “For instance, around where I live at Danbari near BUK, there are a lot of security threats to students who live there; you hear cases of phone snatching, stabbing and theft among other criminal activities,” he noted.
Another student, Abdulrahman Badmus, who spoke with LEADERSHIP at the event stated that as student of technology, government can adopt a modern technological device or software that one can send a message(SOS) to the nearest security post when in distress, by that, security officers can respond immediately to salvage any security situation.
