Challenges with Nigeria’s educational system

Fifty-Seven years after Nigeria became a republic, its efforts to increase human productivity through its educational system has been largely sporadic.
Results from global human capital development trend and gap analyses published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in its recent Global Human Capital Report show that Nigeria is not equipping its largely youthful population with the necessary skills to enable them create value in the gig economy.
This means Nigeria’s largely youthful population, 44 percent of whom are below 15 years, would be disadvantaged in an increasingly global world, where competition for human capital is no longer restricted to national boundaries.

Nigeria is also estimated to have the world’s fourth largest population by 2050, with more than 400 million people living in the country. A low human capacity base means that this population will become a burden if not equipped with the right skills to compete globally, analysts warn.

The state of the economy, unemployment, level of hunger and poverty, all these are indications that Nigeria’s human development ability is severely curtailed.

Take basic education, which is expected to provide the necessary foundation to become functional and productive members of society.

Despite a significant increase in net enrolment rates in recent years, it is estimated that about 10 million children of primary school age are still not in school according to United Nations’ International Children Fund (UNICEF). This means these children who are out of school are being denied a chance to compete in the future.

Even when children enroll in schools, many do not complete the primary cycle. According to current data, 30 percent of pupils drop out of primary school and only 54 percent transit to Junior Secondary Schools. Reasons for this low completion rate include child labour, economic hardship and early marriage for girls, says UNICEF.

Nigeria passed the Universal Basic Educational (UBE) Act in 2004 to improve education for children but the result has not been impressive.

To assess the efficiency and performance of the UBE school system, the Monitoring Learning Achievement (MLA) project, an international consultative forum, in collaboration with the Federal Government, measured pupils’ performance in three domains of knowledge: literacy (English language), numeracy (mathematics) and life skills (social studies, health education, basic science, home economics,) across some states of the federation.

The mean percent scores on the literacy was 25.1 percent, numeracy stood at 32.2 percent, while life skills tests was 32.6 percent.

This corroborates the findings in a recent World Bank report on global development which warns of impending learning crisis in development countries. “While not all developing countries suffer from such extreme learning gaps, many fall far short of levels they aspire to. Leading international assessments on literacy and numeracy show that the average student in poor countries performs worse than 95 percent of the students in high-income countries” the report states.

Post basic and vocational education is suffering, too. Nigeria sorely needs a well thought out strategy for vocational education, which will enable the youth become employers of labour. A Technical Vocation Education and Training (TVET) model to learn from is Germany’s. Germany’s vocational education programme is a dual system whereby students learn in the classroom and also learn by doing.

Germany policy-makers know that not all students like or flourish under the traditional studies system. They realise some clearly don’t have aptitude for college or academic work but are great with their hands. But they see all the kids as potential assets who will shine if they are matched with the right vocation. And it created a system – a strong partnership of employers and unions with government – to do the matching and provide the necessary training. Nigeria needs to quickly domesticate this.

In a different report titled ‘The Future of Jobs and Skills in Africa,’ the WEF highlighted four particular areas for strategic focus, which include: “ensuring the ‘future-readiness’ of curricula, especially through a focus on Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields; investing in digital fluency and ICT literacy skills; providing robust and respected technical and vocational education and training (TVET); and creating a culture of lifelong learning, including the provision of adult training and up skilling infrastructure,” the report stated.