Issues affecting child education

The issue affecting child education is one of the major issues we are facing in this country, The situation exists because Nigeria’s education sector is plagued with quite a few issues that need to be fixed to ensure that every child has access to quality education, in line with the UN’s Global Goal 4 for quality education and that is why the Christian Folarin Abu foundation is trying her best to give the Nigeria child a good education.

Consider this list as some of the major issues affecting child education.

1. Funding:

Budget cuts have created huge problems for most public schools in recent years. Less funding means smaller staff, fewer resources, and a lower number of services for students. While some argue that throwing more money at the education problems won’t make them go away, others assert that lack of funding caused many of the problems in the first place.

Similar to health care, education is seriously underfunded in Nigeria. In 2018, only 7% of the national budget was allocated to education, far below UNESCO’s recommended 15%-26%. In 2020, it was 6.7%. 

While many schools are owned and funded by the government, the education sector is also heavily privatized with private, often more expensive schools proliferating across various levels of education. These schools are usually out of the reach of most Nigerians, who live below the poverty line. 

2. Curriculum:

Most of the Nigerian education curriculum is still based on the Universal Basic Education (UBE) program that it adopted in 1981, thus limiting the number of digital skills many Nigerian students are able to receive via formal education compared to their counterparts in other countries. 

“Of course the curriculum is outdated. We often have to update them ourselves as things evolve in the world. Imagine teaching kids about floppy disks and 90s programming languages but in 2020. There is a disconnect between what they are seeing at home and on TV and what they are being taught in school,” a lecturer at a private university in Lagos told Global Citizen, preferring to not be named. 

3. Poverty

 Technorati reported last fall that 22 percent of the children in the U.S. live at or below the poverty level. American Graduate defines poverty as a family of four with an annual income level of $23,050 or lower. American Graduate also cites a report from the Southern Education Foundation, which shows in 17 states across the U.S., low-income students now comprise the majority of public school students in those states. Some estimates put poverty levels for public school students at 25% in the not-so-distant future.

4. Teachers Training and Upskill

This is one of the issues affecting child education, according to a 2012 inter-ministerial committee report on the state of Nigerian universities, just 43% of Nigeria\’s 37,504 university lecturers have PhDs. This trickles down to lower levels of education where there are few properly qualified teachers and a lot of less qualified ones. 

There are also no nationally-recognized teacher hiring guidelines and private school teaching is hardly regulated. Issues like this leave huge quality gaps in the education of Nigerian children.

There are many issues affecting child education in public schools today, but identifying those issues is half the battle. With a laundry list of challenges to face, now is the time for educators, parents, and lawmakers to come together and begin to find solutions – for the benefit of all students in public schools today.