UNESCO, World Bank to partner on early child education

   

  The United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) has commenced talks with the World Bank to expand advocacy and supports for early childhood education in the country.

   UNESCO Regional Director, Mr. Ydo Yao, who stated that every Nigerian child has right to early childhood learning said there was need for partnerships to conduct needs assessment on the Early Childhood Care Education (ECCE) Play and Resilient project, aimed at promoting basic education and enabling easy transition to primary classes.

   He disclosed this at a stakeholders meeting, held in Abuja to discuss report findings on the ECCE needs assessment conducted in Adamawa and Ebonyi States. The China-Africa collaboration project is being implemented also in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Responding to commitments from the World Bank representative, Dr. Tunde Adekola, who charged stakeholders to extend the study to other states, Yao said UNESCO was ready and willing to work with the Bank. The project was aimed at supporting states and non-state actors, challenged with poor ECCE to develop their capacity and materials production.

     Yao said: “UNESCO is not a funding agency but when we heard about you saying money is not an issue, we are very happy. As you know, we are technical cooperation agency. We initiate some ideas on technical issues that we share with government and when government sees that it is good like this project, we are very happy.  “The government has bought into this, so the second phase is to look for partners, who will accompany us to make maximum impact on children in Nigerian as much as possible because, you have really said it, the few states we conducted the study on are not enough and all Nigerian children deserve to be taken care of.

     “I can assure you that my team and others will meet very soon, come up with a proposal so that you can accommodate us in this scaling up and majority of the children can benefit from it.”  Adekola, who is World Bank Senior Education Specialist, urged all concerned stakeholders to replicate the study in the states, especially Kano, Jigawa, Niger, and Sokoto. He called for consistent capacity building for teachers in order to deliver good and quality education to the pupils.

  

    According to him, the ECCD is a very sustainable strategy to reduce out of school children in Nigeria. “The experience has shown, when people get closer to education, it is like air. Once you breathe in, you won’t die. You can talk about the quality of air you breathe which will determine your lifespan but in terms of existence, you need air to breathe, the same thing with education.  “If children start breathing in very early in life, many of us who are here it’s because we are part of the experience. I will like to say ECCD can provide equity of opportunity for everybody to have same opportunities to have access and better life in the future so that things will go on,” Adekola said.