The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said Nigeria must invest in building the capacity of teachers to enhance access to quality education for all.
The UNICEF Representative in Nigeria, Christian Munduate, stated this at a media interactive session, midweek, in Bauchi.
She said 75 percent of Nigerian children aged between seven and 14 years lack foundational learning skills in literacy and numeracy.
“How teachers perform while they are delivering education for children needs to be frequently assessed.
“There is a need to know how to distinguish between a lack of teaching better and a lack of performance. There are many reasons why at the end of the day, we have 75 percent of children not reading, writing, or making basic arithmetic operations.
“The problems come from different reasons and these reasons need to be addressed,” she said.
According to Munduate, UNICEF is committed to a national assessment of capacities to determine what are the training needs of teachers in the country.
She assured that the UN agency would also conduct a similar exercise to assess the performance of children, adding that they planned to make the assessment exercise an annual event.
The UNICEF official said the such exercise was imperative to enable authorities at different levels to appraise their performances in terms of quality education in the country.
“The families and parents need to understand that education is important for the children and their well-being.
“The more the child is educated, the more chances this child will have to get a job and support his parents.
“But if a child doesn’t get this opportunity of education, the chances are very little and this increases the circle of poverty,” she said.
On immunisation, Munduate said that UNICEF would work with the Nigerian government to enhance immunisation coverage in the next five years.
She said the organisation has been supporting Nigeria to vaccinate its children under the “Zero dose or zero children with zero vaccines”.
