Poor quality education makes 4mln Nigerian children drop out – UNICEF

The poor quality of education is the reason why four million Nigerian children drop out annually, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Wednesday.

The UNICEF’s Chief of Field Office in North-East Nigeria, Phuong T. Nguyen, made this statement at the Foundational Literacy and Numeracy seminar in Maiduguri, saying that “one-third of teachers in the North-East are not qualified to teach”

She also said that there are 1.6 million children out-of-schools in the North-East, and 70 percent of Nigerian children cannot read or solve simple math problems.

UNICEF trained over 1,200 qualified teachers to teach in various schools in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states.

“We have done enough assessments to realise that from baseline to the midline, we have really increased over 55 percent of children are able to read and write in addition to solving simple mathematics problems, with that in mind, we are ready to scale up,” she added.