Tackling Child Bride Menace, Illiteracy through EdoBEST
Chiemelie Ezeobi writes that through its EdoBEST initiative, the state government is tackling child bride menace and illiteracy, a move that recently yielded fruit with the $75m facility from the Word Bank
Memunatu Musa, a 14-year-old pupil of Enikaro Primary School in Benin City, Edo State, had a dream. Given her brilliance, her dream to further her education should have been a breeze, but poverty struck. As one of the most promising students in the school, her love for academics shone through her performances.
All too soon, the family’s finances couldn’t shoulder her academic needs. Unfortunately, she was married off to a 50–year-old man in Katsina State. That singular move derailed her vision to study.
Save for the timely intervention of Governor Godwin Obaseki, who through the Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation (EdoBEST) programme, rescued her and reintegrated her into the school system, her dream would have gone awry like do many other young girls who were married off early.
According to girlsnotbrides, a social advocacy group against child marriage, 26 per cent of girls in Benin are married before their 18th birthday and seven per cent are married before the age of 15. Most of these young girls terminate their schooling to become wives, thus increasing the number of out of school children.
This is one of the reasons why Nigeria has one of the highest numbers of out-ofschool children globally. The figure has been estimated to be over 13 million Nigerian boys and girls that are not in school. The provision of standard education programmes and access itself has become a challenge to many states.
But Edo is bent on changing that narrative with EdoBEST, through which it has continued to change the perception of the people about politics and governance. Given the impact it achieved in the primary level, the programme is set to be extended to the junior secondary school level in the state.
Apart from its positive transformation in the state’s education sector, the reform programme is targeted at achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all).
The EdoBEST initiative is also targeted at improving teacher quality and performance, increase numeracy and literacy levels among pupils and improve school administration and management. Undeniably, it has transformed education in the state from analogue to digital, with teachers using custom-built, cloud-run tablets.
In the EdoBEST programme, over 8,700 teachers have been trained and equipped with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) devices for improved learning outcomes, which have positively impacted over 150,000 school children in the state.
Over 234 schools are being reconstructed with 7,094 computer tablets distributed to teachers and headteachers, while 11,688 School-Based Management Committee
(SBMC) members have also been trained to help in administering and maintaining public education facilities.
Just like other key institutions that have interests in the development of the education sector, Governor Obaseki’s initiatives in the sector has not gone unnoticed. In a recently published commentary on its website, the World Economic Forum (WEF) applauded the EdoBEST initiative for improving learning outcomes among pupils in primary schools across the state and described Governor Obaseki, as a trailblazer who is “quickly and dramatically lifting the quality of government schools and up-skilling teachers in his low-income state.”
According to the WEF, “education experts around the world and across Africa, in particular, are paying close attention to EdoBEST, and has become a beacon of light to other education ministries because it is improving learning for marginalised children and up-skilling both novice and experienced teachers at scale, within existing state budgets and without western aid.”
The forum said that the changes are happening within the existing system and being spearheaded by existing teachers and school leaders, and hailed the reforms as “a Nigerian solution to a Nigerian problem.”
The World Bank and the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) have also highlighted EdoBEST as a crucial program that can be a template for transforming education in educationally disadvantaged societies. In September 2019, the World Bank Group organised a side-event at the UNGA summit in New York to discuss Edo-BEST.
Thus, it was not surprising that at a time when grants and facilities from the World Bank seemed tilted toward finding solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic and cushioning recessions in countries, the Edo State government recently got a $75m facility from the global bank to address issues of education development.
The new development, which is the $75m facility, is given to further the governor’s vision of holistically revamping the state’s
education sector.
According to the Special Adviser to the Governor on Media and Communication Strategy, Mr. Crusoe Osagie, this facility did not come from the blues, as it was the handiwork of the steady developmental strides of the Governor Godwin Obaseki-led administration’s strategic implementation of programmes in the education sector that has attracted the attention of the World Bank.
Applauding the governor’s initiative at the grassroots level, a primary six and primary five pupils of Eveva Primary School, Okugbe Okpella in Etsako East Local Government Area, Promise Oshoke and Monica Aliu, said the Obaseki-led administration has made learning more interesting and exciting for them.
The pupils enumerated some of the facilities provided by the state government to aid learning and teaching to include modern desks, textbooks, computers, and school buildings.
Also, teachers in Omigie Primary School, Okpella were full of encomiums for the state
government for giving the school a facelift through the construction of a block of classrooms and a headmaster office, as well as toilets for pupils and teachers.
Ayo Omokhagbon and Raymond Madugu, both teachers in the school said the EdoBEST initiative introduced by the Obaseki led administration has brought professionalism into the education sector as pupils now learn at the same level of competence.
The Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) also recently bestowed Governor Obaseki with the Best Performing Governor Award in recognition of his education reforms, the success of the Edo-BEST programme and his prioritisation of teachers’ welfare in the state.
While receiving the award, Governor Obaseki said, “If you are not able to add your sums and pronounce your alphabets, you cannot write and you cannot think logically. So, what we have done in Edo in the last one and a half years is to first prioritise basic education and technical education.”
He argued that basic education from the perspective of encouraging teachers, deploying technology to determine and tell when a teacher is in class, among others, form the basis of the Edo-BEST programme in the state.
“I can tell from my office today when a teacher is in class. If a teacher is not in class then the teacher hasn’t signed into the database. Once a teacher is signed in, the lesson note for that day will be loaded into the teacher’s tablet. And we’ve trained teachers to understand how to use the tablets and the technology to teach the children. So, this is also to motivate them and corporal punishment has been abolished in our schools. The outcome is that children are learning. A child in Edo state today after one term has now learnt more than three terms of work in the old system.”
Speaking on the significance of the award, Governor Obaseki said, “What this award means is that a nation should know that we are prioritising education as a party. The country should know that what is important today is mental infrastructure, the intellectual infrastructure not stomach infrastructure.”
Speaking during one of the numerous ward-to-ward rallies ahead of the September 19 governorship election in the state, Governor Obaseki, who is the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), assured that the money which was approved by the World Bank Board will be utilised to change the face of education in Edo and Nigeria for the next three years.
He commended members of his cabinet for the successes recorded in the sector, stating that the intervention fund would help to expand the existing EdoBEST programme from the basic education level to secondary level and reset state the state’s tertiary education system on the path of progress.
“What this means is that over the next three years, we will have about N40 billion to utilise in changing the face of education in Edo and Nigeria. This is because of the fantastic work which members of our team have undertaken in the past few years to show the world what we can do with our educational system.
“It will interest you to know that this facility will help us at the secondary school level to do what we have started doing at the basic education level so that by the time a child has gone through five years of learning, that child will be exposed not only to learning and literacy but also to a vocation. This is the last time in our history that our education system will produce ‘Agberos’,” he vowed. So far, many states within the country, including Lagos, have visited Edo State to learn from the EdoBEST success story.
The state has also received foreign delegations from Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, among others, who have come to understudy the Edo-BEST programme, including accolades from the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Bank, the Finnish Embassy, among others, on the impact of the reforms in schools across the state.