Nigeria to miss 2030 SDGs 4 target on Education, unless…
UNICEF Nigeria Education Specialist Abdurrahman Ado Ibrahim making a presentation on SDGs 4 target. Photo: Abubakar Baba Ahmad
By Abubakar Baba Ahmad.
The United Nations Children’s Fund UNICEF has urged governments at all levels to increase the threshold of Education Financing towards achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Four SDGs 4 target.
The SDGs 4 target seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all from basic to upper basic level.
The UNICEF Chief of Education, Saadhna Panday-Soobrayan made the call while delivering a paper titled Education in Nigeria: the race to SDG 4- Issues, Trends and Prospects at a Media Dialogue on Out of School Children in Bauchi.
Saadhna Panday represented by the UNICEF Nigeria Education Specialist Abdurrahman Ibrahim said with less than one percent GDP allocation to education, Nigeria is off the mark in achieving the Global Financing target of 4 to 6 percent far below South Africa and Ghana whose rating stands at six and four respectively.
While expressing satisfaction with the recent SDG success evaluation, the UNICEF Chief of Education charged all stakeholders to come up with an Action Plan towards meeting up the 2030 target.
“The statistics for children’s access to primary education at six years remains unchanged as the figure in 1995 and 2021 stood at sixty percent. Bauchi State success rate as regards SDGs 4 target is currently at 30 percent, while completion rate stands at 50 percent, a figure that is not encouraging considering the target year”, She explains.
She identified the categories of Out of School Children to include those that never attended school, dropouts, Almajiri, Children with disabilities, normadic children and IDP children with 10.2 million in primary level and 8.1 million at Junior Secondary level accounting for fifteen percent of global population of OOSC.
In separate presentations, the UNICEF Nigeria Communication Specialist Samuel Kaalu and Education Officer Bauchi Field Office Raphael Aiyedipe who identified key stakeholders, cost of schooling, continuous community engagement and sensitisation as its approach to addressing the menace, charged the media to play a leading role in that regard.
The two day media dialogue saw broadcast and print media journalists from Bauchi, Gombe and Taraba states in attendance.
