The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), says it has empowered over 1.8 million Nigerian children with learning materials in the last four years, tasking the Nigerian government to scale up its foundational literacy programmes.
Mrs Yetunde Oluwatosin, the Education Specialist at UNICEF Nigeria, said this when she spoke with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday in Lagos.
Oluwatosin was speaking on the agency’s Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) programme, designed to enhance early child education in Nigeria.
NAN reports that FLN was an innovative learning solution for classrooms and home teaching.
“So, we introduce and support states to implement the teachings at the right level and approach aimed to lay a very good education foundation for the Nigerian child.
“The idea is to ensure that the children achieve or attain the desired level in their grade with the teaching, and learning materials, curriculum-aligned, high quality and inclusive.
“As the child progresses into primary school, giving them an approach of using their mother tongue, they are able to learn and get the literacy and numeracy growth as they should.
“We reached out to over 1.8 million children with learning materials from 2018to 2022 and we are working toward another batch of 4.8 million by 2027.
“We embarked on this because we observed that some children are going through the system but are not at the level that they should, which calls for a remedial approach to bring them back on board,” she said.
The UNICEF specialist said such evidence was being used in different countries, citing India, where the context was similar to that of Nigeria.
She said that the approaches had been piloted, tested and they showed great results.
Oluwatosin urged the government to strengthen its collaboration with UNICEF by allocating more funds to the education sector from the basic level and early education of a child.
“This is a global era where digitalisation and technology rules, therefore, the government should ensure the scale up of these approaches across states, so that our children can learn well as they go through the system,” she said.
She called for regular empowerment and upgrade of teachers in the system to boost their skills, describing them as critical stakeholders.
“We need to get it right from the pre-service level, teachers need their capacity to be built before they go into the profession, to prepare them to teach the 21st century learners.
“Even, when they get to service, there should be continuity. The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria should set the professional standard and how best to implement it.
“Teachers, as they go through the years, they need new approaches to enable them to be in form with other teachers in other parts of the world.
“Schools need to have very effective, capacity-built teachers, knowledgeable with that mentoring, coaching approach which is one of the areas UNICEF is focusing on,” she said.
Oluwatosin said that there were different interventions, while the government was rising.
“They are doing what they are supposed to do, but need to do more.
“Development partners are still there, they are bringing in models and we are seeing that the models are working.”
Oluwatosin solicited collaborations between parents and teachers, saying, ’It is necessary to engage parents in learning to enable them to follow the curriculum of their wards and ensure that teachers are living up to expectations.’’
