The Civil Society Action Coalition on Education for All (CSACEFA) has organised a one-day stakeholders meeting aimed at setting agenda for the government in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the education sector.
The meeting, which was attended by 50 participants representing about 30 government agencies and many civil society organisations, was held in Abuja, over the weekend.
According to Programme Officer CSACEFA, Adeleke Damian-Mary, the meeting was organised to discuss the stakeholders’ role in the implementation of the SDGs, their targets, indicators and challenges as well as propose way forward for the new administration.
In her remarks, Policy Adviser CSACEFA Chioma Osuji, noted that though remarkable progress was made in the achievement of the Education For All (EFA) and the education-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) across the globe, the goals were not reached by the end of 2015 deadline. This according to her necessitated the SDGs.
An educationist, Hillary Ogbonna, noted that SDGs would have to find solutions to the challenges of the MDGs in order to succeed.
According to him, inter-governmental partnership, insecurity, fragmentation of resources and low community involvement in programmes were some of the challenges for MDGs.
He said MDGs would be universally applicable but have to be flexible to meet specific needs of countries.
He stated that Nigeria had been able to achieve some of the MDGs on poverty reduction and food production.
For Nigeria to achieve the SDGs according to him, the civil society was expected to function in the areas of communication, stakeholders’ mobilization, monitoring and evaluation, shadow reporting, budget advocacy and analysis.
The participants recommended that periodic stakeholders meeting should be held with the intention of monitoring and evaluating the progress of the SDGs.