The Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, has budgeted over N2,768,908,275.44 to support 2,505 communities for the building of two classrooms each in 5,010 primary schools across Nigeria.
At the national flag-off of the school-based Management Committee-School Improvement Programme, SBMC-SIP, at Coronation Hall of the Government House in Kano, the commission’s Executive Secretary Dr. Hamid Bobboyi said over 120 schools benefitted from the disbursement of funds.
These, he said, raged from N250,000, N1 million, N5 million and N7 million for the renovation, construction of blocks of classrooms, supply of furniture, completion of abandoned buildings/classrooms as well as purchase of teaching materials.
According to him, State Universal Basic Education Boards, SUBEBs, were directed to receive request letters from the commission through which communities submitted proposals for the projects.
Bobboyi said the commission identified the needs of the schools and developed action plan based on the schools’ needs assessment.
He said: “The guiding principle of the self-help and community engagement approach is to engender strong partnership and the desire to draw and harness state resources and skills alongside the abundant material and human resources in the community with a view to developing the basic education sub-sector.
“It is a view widely held that no nation can sustain a robust, functional and qualitative basic education without the meaningful and strategic involvement of its citizenry.
“The need for instituting the SBMC-SIP, therefore, was informed by the fact that, the overall success of the basic education sub-sector in Nigeria depends largely on the level of community awareness, participation and support to the programme.
“The vision of the Commission in the SBMC-SIP, was therefore to put up a strategy for school development whereby community initiated self-help projects would be implemented by the SBMCs.”
Education Minister Adamu Adamu, who was represented by the Permanent Secretary in the ministry, Sunny Echeno, said the Universal Basic Education programme “is Nigeria’s home-grown initiative aimed at addressing national aspirations and meeting global expectations through the provision of qualitative functional education free of charge to all children of school-going age.
“However, implementation experiences have shown that the delivery of basic education in the country is being faced with daunting challenges that militate against Nigeria’s drive towards meeting her developmental goals and global expectations.
“Thus, it became imperative within the context of the challenges such as phenomenal inadequacy of teacher quality and sufficiency, inefficient infrastructure, large size of out-of-school children, skyrocketing population growth and inadequate finances that the full involvement of all and sundry is required to reverse the trend.”
Kano State Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje said his administration had initiated community participation in the development of basic education.
The move, the governor said, had generated billions of naira for renovation and rehabilitation of schools, provision of books and other writing materials as well as reduced the number of out-of-school children in the state.