The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) has granted $20 million to three North East states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe to improve foundational learning skills of students and tackle educational challenges facing the region.
The Minister of Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, while speaking at the flag off of the programme’s implementation on Tuesday in Abuja, said the GPE-accelerated funding was meant to “support state-driven interventions that transparently address the gaps in delivering education in emergency and inequities existing within the education sector in each of the BAY (Borno, Adamawa and Yobe) states.
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“The GPE-accelerated funding will anchor on existing interventions…to improve inequalities to access and quality learning with a focus on foundational and transferable skills and governance.”
Malam Adamu said the grant would help establish robust teacher preparation, professional development and recruitment systems, address protection issues and strengthen leadership capacity for education in emergencies for long-term sustainability.
The programme is also expected to reduce the number of out-of-school children and mitigate the challenges and respond to urgent educational needs emerging from the protracted crisis in the North East, the Covid-19 pandemic and the gaps identified by the Joint Education Needs Assessment (JENA) of the education cluster, as well as the policies and strategic priorities defined by the three states in the various Education Sector Plans (ESPs) and State Education Sector Operational Plan (SESOP).
The Permanent Secretary in the ministry, Sonny Echono, said they graciously decided to utilise the fund in the three North East states because they were the most affected by insurgency and that many education facilities had been destroyed and children displaced from their homes.
Echono said, “This fund will also assist in what the government is doing to ensure that education continues even in conflict situations.”
The UNICEF Country Representative in Nigeria, Peter Hawkins, in his remarks, said the GPE-accelerated funding had been provided in response to the educational impact of the protracted crisis in the North East.
Hawkins said as a result of systemic challenges within the education sector, Borno, Adamawa and Yobe (BAY) states with a total population of 5.5 million between ages 6 and 15 had large gender disparity and the lowest performance in almost all critical education indicators compared to other states in Nigeria.
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