This admission by a captain of Nigerian business confirms the important suspicion about the excellent of education in Africa’s second biggest economy. Tangentially, it gestures towards the challenges of massive unemployment, brain-drain and manpower shortages that continue to cripple domestic efforts to reach rapidly sustainable growth. For qualified youths seeking for a job, it also explains the prolonged and intensive pre-recruitment tests that Nigerian corporate houses insist on ahead of hiring neighborhood talent.
Western education 1st came to Nigeria with missionaries in the middle of the 19th Century, who set up the country’s 1st schools. By the time Nigerians declared independence from colonial rule in 1960, there were three distinct education systems in operation: indigenous neighborhood training and apprenticeship in rural areas, schools of Islamic finding out and ultimately formal education offered by European-influenced institutions. Even though stress on the formal education method remained intense in the years following, the collapse of worldwide oil prices in the early ’80s forced large reductions in government spending on education. The outcome was a gradual degradation at all levels of learning, from primary schools to universities, and a corresponding fall in literacy and employment prices. According to a 2005 report, the all round literacy price had fallen from almost 72% in 1991 to 64% at the end of the final century2. Additional disturbing details have been place forward by the Employment and Growth Study launched by the Nigerian government and the World Bank’s International Improvement Agency in 2008. According to this study, unemployment levels remained unfazed in between 1999 and 2006 in spite of a 7% development of the non-oil economy in the very same period3. Additionally, even though job opportunities grew corresponding with the labour force, youth unemployment really showed substantial improve. The report notes accordingly that “Nigeria’s growth functionality has not responded to the employment aspirations of its population as a whole”. In spite of considerable initiatives in the fields of education and employment generation, 1 out of 5 Nigerian adults continues to be unemployed according to some estimates, and only just about every tenth university graduate ever manages to get a job.
The findings are revelatory in the context of Abuja’s frantic efforts to prioritise educational restructuring as a tool for economic competitiveness. It is also a sad commentary on the efficacy of properly-intended but likely token policy initiatives – like the compulsory entrepreneurship coaching programme for all college graduates ordered by former president O Obsanjo.
Whilst the relative merits of such measures can be debated endlessly, the concentrate on enterprise is hardly in query. Emerging out of a turbulent economic and political history at the starting of the new millennium, the civilian leadership in Nigeria was grasped with the formidable challenge of reversing decades of economic stagnation and negative development trends. Abuja’s answer to accelerated development was vigorous enterprise promotion in the SME space. The government simultaneously embarked on an enthusiastic reforms programme aimed at correcting simple macroeconomic imbalances, eradicating poverty and raising typical living requirements. To additional consolidate national ambitions, it signed the UN Millennial Declaration of 2000 for universal human rights and formally adopted targets to establish Nigeria as one of the major 20 world economies by 2020. With its abundance of all-natural and human sources, Nigeria is primed to drive an enterprise revolution that will deliver explosive growth and sufficiently diversify the economy beyond its classic obsession with oil and gas. Education is vital to this scheme of points simply because of its direct link to productivity, and since the extent of Nigeria’s economic development is fundamentally dependent on the skills of its workforce.
The following are some of the greatest challenges facing Nigerian education:
1. Inadequate infrastructure, manpower and gear across all levels of education, from major to tertiary.
2. Beneath-funding from government, which continues to shrivel resources and stunt growth in the sector.
3. Restrained private participation and virtually exclusive dependence on government aid.
4. Issues of duty and control due to overlapping federal, state and regional government jurisdiction.
5. Insufficient use of facts and communication technologies, modern day gear and innovative approaches of teaching.
six. Reliance on expatriate faculty in greater educational institutes due to lack of regional manpower.
7. Absence of curricula relevant to national manpower requirements and human development goals.
Advisory commissions set up by colonial governments in the early 20th Century have been amongst the first to report standard deficiencies in educational systems across Africa. They noted that the excellent of education supplied in the continent was singularly detached from the needs and aspiration of local populations. Sadly, that continues to be the issue in Nigeria at least, where the government has been hard put to revamp the education program in line with the MDG and 2020 ambitions. Since of the time-bound nature of these programmes, Nigeria demands to provide rapid on several counts.
* The government must design and style broad techniques to revive and create the education program in tune with socio-economic realities and the country’s lengthy-term growth targets.
* Investment in education has to be substantially enhanced expenditure models require to be reworked to allow for universal fundamental education with each other with effective vocational coaching.
* A substantial portion of the investment must go for infrastructure improvement and training and orientation programmes for teachers at all levels.
Project Topics of larger education will have to be achieved with the aim of providing socially relevant expertise to unemployed youths in each rural and urban regions.
* Development of sound tertiary institutions to supply quality expertise education and instruction to internationally acceptable requirements is important.
* Government have to make situations for elevated participation by the private sector and civil-society organisations in educational reform and execution.
* Successful monitoring and supervision of budgetary allowances in education need to be produced a priority to guarantee accountable utilisation of sources.