NEDC Pledges To Seal Gaps In Teacher Training

North East Development Commission (NEDC) yesterday announced plans to seal gaps in the teacher training within the region’s schools which was blame to insurgency for years.

Managing Director of the NEDC, Dr Mohammed Alkali, made this known at the graduation ceremony of the 100 Tsangaya and Islamiyya Teachers at the Nigeria Arabic Language Village Ngala (NALV), Maiduguri.
The commission has pledged to sponsor 600 Tsangaya and Islamiyya teachers for training across the North-eastern states which started with first 100 from Borno.

The training was organised by the Nigeria Arabic Language Village Ngala (NALV) in collaboration with the NEDC.

The objective of the two-weeks programme, organised by NALV in collaboration with NEDC was to improve the teaching standard of Islamic and Arabic education.

Alkali lamented that the region had lost more than 20,000 teachers from the beginning of insurgency to date, noting that it would be very difficult for the region to recover the cream of such professional teachers within a short time.

The managing director said that when the commission was inaugurated in 2017, it was also discovered that the region has a large number of unemployed youth, hence the danger of ignoring them without supporting them with skills acquisition related training.

Alkali said that it was based on that the Commission’s board decided to solve the problem of the youth then by coming up with the idea of creating ITC centres across the states under it which had so far trained 2,000 youths on various skills.

Muhammad also said that the commission planing to consider building some modern Tsangaya schools to complement the efforts of some state governments to further increase employment opportunities in the region.

He, however, assured that the NEDC would continue to engage the services of NALV in tackling training related gap in the region’s school and as well support those participating in the programme with starter packs.

The managing director directed the management of NALV to immediately commence the training of the 2rd batch of training for the second set of the 100 Tsangaya and Islamiyya Teachers from the remaining 500 scheduled for the training.

Earlier in his welcome address, Prof. Ibrahim Muhammad, Director NALV, said that the participants were not only trained on various skills acquisition but were also equipped with the necessary tools to work with on their graduation.

He observed that what village was doing for Tsangaya and Islamiyya teachers has similarity but in advance way with what Gov. Babagana Zulum of Borno was doing in his Tsangaya transformation programme.