The Secretary-General of the Organisation of Educational Cooperation (OEC), Sheik Manssour Bin Mussallam, is understudying the Nigeria’s National Language Policy (NLP) to understand the framework for language development to achieve inclusive education.
According to him, Nigeria is one of the member states that took concrete steps of the commitment taken with the universal declaration for inclusive education of ensuring mother tongue education as an essential component of equitable social development.
Mussallam stated this in Abuja at the weekend when he visited the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC).
He noted that the purpose of OEC is to contribute to the equitable, just and prosperous social transformation of societies by promoting balanced and inclusive education.
OEC is the latest international intergovernmental organisation created on January 29, 2020 at the International Summit on Balanced and Inclusive Education in Djibouti.
He said the organization was working with member states and their institutions to provide technical support in financial and capital investment for the development of indigenous technologies.
Te stated: “To revive our mother tongue is to dismantle the walls that prohibit our youths and our people from fulfilling, not only their full aspiration, but also that our youths and our people become once and for all drivers of our own world, drivers of development, and drivers of our transformation to which we aspire.”
Earlier, Executive Secretary, NERDC, Professor Ismail Junaidu, said: “We’ve undertaken the development of National Language Policy, the first of its kind in Nigeria and in many other parts of the world and updating of a sociolinguistic survey of language diversity and use in Nigeria.”
He said the NERDC was developing guidelines for the implementation of the NLP and was battling with over 600 languages while creating the enabling environment for the development and use of Nigerian languages in schools.