Lagos — Executive Secretary of the National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult and Non-Formal Education (NMEC) Dr. Dayo Olagunju, is unhappy when people confuse non-formal education with informal education, or education with schooling. In this interview by Bukola Olatunji, he took time to differentiate between them, even as he insists that adult education and mass literacy must receive equal attention with basic education for the fight against illiteracy to be won

On the difference between schooling and education Schooling is an aspect of education. That is going to school. It is not only in school that you get educated. In fact, the education you get in school is so minute, compared to the education you get in life. That was why the UNESCO Institute of Education in Hamburg , which was devoted to adult and non-formal learning, was changed to the Institute of Lifelong Learning because it is actually the education that takes you through life. But in Nigeria , we see non formal education as a foot note or an appendage when discussing issues of education. As far as we are concerned, everything about education is schooling. That is why government spends so much money on the formal aspect of UBE, to the neglect of the non-formal. The state governments don't even bother about non-formal education, even though the law passed by the National Assembly states, in its definition, that basic education includes non-formal, adult and nomadic education. But in the distribution of resources, non-formal and nomadic education are omitted, which means we do not think they are important enough.

On the difference between non-formal and informal education

Non-formal education is that which is organised for people who had gone beyond the age of going into the formal system (so called because it is structured, you build schools and people go there to be taught). It is not structured, so it can be done at any time (morning, afternoon or evening). It does not have a specific venue. It can be held it in the church, mosque. That is why when it comes to infrastructure we don't usually cost for classroom because we use existing structures. In the evening, we can go and use a school that is being used for formal education use in the morning. We can use the palace of a traditional ruler, we can use a community centre, village square or a market. You can put a literacy centre in the market where people can come and learn. Informal education, on the other hand, is the type of education you acquire when you don't actually know you are acquiring it. The example I give most of the time is, your child is learning how to speak. Nobody sits the child down and says, "Now I want to teach you how to speak", but the child picks from the mother, father, sister, uncle and during that process of learning, he is corrected. That is informal education because you do not plan to acquire it, but it is acquired any way.

Non-formal education encompasses mass literacy and this is much more than people being taught to read and write A, B, C. It is the ability to acquire, process and make use of information. Reading and writing is just the basic form of it. That is why the word is being used in a generic form today and you can say somebody is computer literate. Someone who does not know anything about the computer is a computer illiterate. You can describe someone as an illiterate driver. Talking about the latter, you can see that majority of us, who drive in Nigeria , are illiterate drivers. I have not a done a study and I do not know if anyone has done it, but I am sure that more than 90 percent of the people who drive in Nigeria have not seen a copy of the Highway Code, talk more of reading it. We do not know road signs, talk less of obeying them. That is why we have one of the highest rates of death by road accidents in the world. These are some of the issues that mass literacy can address. Health literacy is also a part of it. We want to reduce maternal and child mortality, but we have parents that are stark illiterates, who cannot even read the name or schedule of medicines given to them. A woman is in labour, but she does know what to expect and at what time she should advance towards the hospital. These are issues which non formal education can address, but is not taken seriously because we don't understand it. We don't blame any body. Those of us in the field, who are supposed to let people know about it, do not take time to explain it. You can imagine that people, even the so-called Educationists refer to non-formal education as informal education.

On efforts to popularise non-formal education

We have decided to start from getting the attention of people and you can only do that through the press. We were lucky that the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) on Saturday March 1, 2008 actually focused on literacy. We appeared and spoke on the programme and the response has been fantastic, a lot of people have called to say that they never knew the difference between the various types of education until they watched the programme. We are also trying to reach out to communities, people in government and also I have written to governors to book appointments, but have not been able to secure appointment with many of them. But I have visited one ( Niger State ) and the response we got from that state was fantastic. Before I left his office that day, the governor had swung into action

On what the states should do

Basic education is within the purview of states and local government, and the first stage of our literacy activity would be the basic level, because we have over 50 million Nigerians who cannot read and write. It is not within the responsibility of the federal government, just like junior secondary and primary education are under the states. We have to talk to the states because most of the states don't even put any money at all into mass literacy programme. Incidentally, every state in Nigeria has a mass education agency, but they are not funded. In fact I can say without any fear of contradiction that in most states, that agency is almost like a Siberia , where you just post people who you want to make irrelevant. We want them to put money into their state agencies. Because right now, all the state agencies in Nigeria put together are registering less than one million adult literacy class goers in a year and if we have 50 million illiterates and we are registering a million, that means it will take us 50 years to absorb everyone. That is if the population remains the same. Remember that the last population census that we had put our growth rate at 2.8 percent. When you calculate that, you will have an idea of what our population would be in 2015 and the number of illiterates. If you go to the states, you discover that virtually nothing is happening in the mass literacy sector. Some of the things some states are doing may be because we at the federal level have given a little something. We are not benefiting from the Universal Basic Education (UBE) fund at the federal level but from our budget we are able to give them little thing, then the development partners, UNICEF, most of the states, the work they do is that of UNICEF or MDG, although MDG does not give them money directly. So this is the problem and this is where we want state governors to come in. Every state should take literacy seriously because it is the first line in the address of the issue of poverty. In fact, any issue in development. That is why the United Nations made it a matter. We have a literacy decade which is going on right now. UNESCO has established a Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE), which is the flagship of that decade, to really get nations to queue up behind the development plan by giving literacy the attention it deserves. At the Bamako conference in September, it was stated that every state, country should increase the percentage of their education budget to literacy issues. If we, in this country can devote just 10 percent of all the attention, funding, all the resources that we give to schooling to mass literacy, then we would make progress.

On the activities of NMEC

We were set up to eradicate illiteracy in Nigeria . We coordinate the activities of state agencies. Our activities also include formulation of policies, the curriculum for adult learner and we also monitor and evaluate programmes of state agencies as they relate to basic literacy, post literacy and continuing education. We do not have a curriculum like that of the formal system. You know these are people who cannot read books, so we do primers which they use.

An assessment of the 'Literacy by Radio project

My assessment will be that it was a very successful programme, except that we didn't have the support of state governments. We signed a MoU with the state governments because it was UNESCO's idea and we had planned to pilot it in 12 states. One of the areas in which the states were supposed to come in was in paying for the air time. We had the technical side of it, the development of the primers, the training of the radio literacy facilitators, establishment of the radio literacy community group and so on. But some of the state governments that were supposed to fund the air time did not fund it, In fact, it did not take off in their states. But I am happy to say that in the states where it took place, we actually had stories of success. Kebbi was one of our success stories. The lady from Cuba , who was our technical partner came the other day to do the assessment and she was really impressed.

If we have state governments giving us the necessary backing and support for that particular programme, we would be talking of more success stories because we believe that it is one very good way in which we can get so many of Nigerian illiterates to be literate.