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Nigeria: '11m Children Out of School'
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This Day (Lagos)
6 May 2008
Posted to the web 7 May 2008
Onwuka Nzeshi
Abuja
Despite Nigeria's pledge in 2000 to deliver Education for All to its citizens, the country accounts 11 million out of the more than 80 million out of school children worldwide.
Minister of Education, Dr. Igwe Aja-Nwachuku disclosed this at a media chat in Abuja, said a recent survey showed that Nigeria is one of the two E-9 countries that might not achieve EFA by 2015. The report showed that 4.7 million children of primary school age and another 5.3 million children of secondary school age were not in school. It also indicated that 62 per cent of the children out of school were girls while 49 per cent were boys.
Aja-Nwachuku recalled that in April 2000, Nigeria along with over 170 countries that met in Dakar, Senegal endorsed an agreement to deliver Education for All by 2015. He said that although a lot of programmes have been put in place to achieve the goal, a lot still needed to be done, adding that the EFA week was designed to draw attention to the fact that access and retention levels particularly for certain categories of people such as girls, children with special needs and those in difficult circumstances were still below acceptable levels.
He sued for the cooperation of the public and private sectors in the efforts to focus on those groups have been excluded from educational opportunities. He identified the groups as children living in poverty, those from ethnic and linguistic minorities, girls in some societies, children from remote and fragile areas and those with disabilities or other special education needs.
According to him, government policies should be targeted at accommodating all children regardless of their physical, intellectual, social, emotional, linguistic or other conditions so as to respect their fundamental human rights.
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