The Nigerian Child (2008)
Ensuring Education for All
Author/Publisher: UNICEF Nigeria
All children deserve a quality education. Unfortunately the girl child is often marginalized and her prospects sacrificed when it comes to sending children to school.
As the lead agency of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative, UNICEF is committed to ensuring that the issue of girls’ education remains at the top of the agenda in Nigeria, thus helping the country to reach two key Millennium Development Goals, the elimination of gender disparity in education and the achievement of universal primary education.
The Girls’ Education project implemented in six northern States by UNICEF with DFID funding has demonstrated that a lot can be achieved when interventions are well articulated and focused and when resources are well managed.
This edition of our new UNICEF Nigeria newsletter is dedicated to education and will give you an overview of the Girls’ Education Project through various stories from the human angle. I hope it will convince you that progress is possible and that a lot is already happening on ground.
What we need now to scale up and sustain these valuable interventions are: commitment and political will that should materialize through allocation of adequate resources and improvement of infrastructure; an improved capacity of education sector institutions in planning, budgeting, delivering supplies and services necessary for quality education. Last but not least, training of teachers is crucial so that pupils will have acquired the expected minimum competencies at the end of the primary school cycle.