Grooming the 21st Century Youth
Mary Ekah In a bid to create an atmosphere where the Nigerian school graduates can compete favourably with their counterparts worldwide, the Incubator Africa Development Teams (IADT) recently held a two-day School Improvement Conference and Exhibition where stakeholders in the education sector met to brainstorm on the way for the dwindling education state in Nigeria.
The conference which brought together some of the most inspiring and experienced speakers and leaders in the education sector aimed to break new grounds in the school improvement efforts by offering alternative way to look at schools as a system. It also focused on how schools can be improved through collaboration, leaning from one another by presenting and sharing work with other schools and education stakeholders.
Speaking on the objectives of the IADT School Improvement Conference, the Chief Executive Officer of Incubator Africa Limited and chief host of the event, Mrs. Alero Ayida-Otobo said “Incubator Africa is crating a platform to bring people in education together to work together, share knowledge, ideas and transform the education sector. So every now and then we have conferences like this and the idea is to pool people that we can collaborate with after the conference. So today is not just about the conference, it is about identifying people that we can work with on projects and programmes in the education sector and what we are looking at for the next two days is the business of education and what it will take to improve schools.”
She said issue treated at the conference included, how to execute programmes that would help you inculcate into your children 21st century skills; how to manage and improve your school; the process for improvement and transformation and the strategies that you have to work on to make sure that your school at the end of the process has improved significantly, adding, “And that is why during this conference, we want to have a blend of both private and public schools because it is important, especially at Lagos state, that you pay attention to the low income private schools because there are a lot more of them and they form about 70 percent of the school population in Lagos State.”
Ayida-Otobo noted further that the conference also targeted “basically primary schools, schools heads of primary schools and secondary schools, leading private schools, as well as the Lagos State Ministry of Education, and every body that takes decision on that which has something to do with education and that would be impacted by additional knowledge and understanding of what is required and the importance of working together to achieve our purpose. “
Recalling how she came into the education sector and why there is need for urgent improvement, she said, “I went into the education in a very interesting way, so it was an eye opening experience for me in 2007. And after working at the Federal level, precisely with international development partners, it became very clear to me that if we do not work together, we would not transform education in Nigeria. If we work in silos, there are certain projects that we cannot achieve. Take for example curriculum enhancement or re-design. You cannot re-design a curriculum solo, it takes collaborative effort of professional practitioners coming together and achieving that purpose and because we do not come together enough, which is why government feels it can design the curriculum without private sector involvement.”
She said therefore that incubator African vision is to pull practitioners and professionals in the education sector together to execute certain programmes in certain areas of education. While stressing on this need to improve on education, Ayida-Otobo noted, “teachers’’ education is paramount and transforming colleges of education is critical.”
She said that right now stakeholders tend to focus on symptoms rather than on root cause, adding that part of IADT’s passion was to have a reformed process take place in the colleges of education in Nigeria.
The Incubator Africa CEO stressed that to raise the next generation of Nigeria, we have to start at a young age, adding that Incubator Africa has an early childhood model that it is working on at the moment, which is believed will impact the childhood. Technical and vocation is another one but again working with people to make sure things happen.
“We tend to focus on symptoms rather than causes and so part of our mission in Incubator Africa is to flip that and to focus on root causes, so the root cause of poor learning outcomes in our schools, poor WAEC exam results is teacher education and the quality of the teacher that are even recruited and the quality of teachers that are taken in at the colleges of education. So we have to go back source, we don’t want to wait till they come out of college of education and then we start retraining them - that is symptom because if we continue with training and we do nit address the root cause, and we go back to the source, we are not cleaning out the source”, she noted further.
She advised government to do the right thing to improve the nation’s education, adding, “we know what t will take to transform education in Nigeria and it can be done but it is going to need commitment, dedication and visionary leadership and commitment like a ten-year plan, You don’t start and stop like we tend to do. We need a leadership that is going to say education is key and that we are going to give it the largest budget and then be sincere about it and then pick a minister of education that knows what to do. It does not necessarily has to be a professor, it just takes somebody wh0 can execute and that is part of our biggest problem, we are good in executing policies and that is a big question.
A resource person at the event and Mrs. Bolaji Osime said Incubator Africa is a platform for people in education from every level to come together and the importance is to bring schools to an improvement conference.
“A lot of schools need to be improved in order to be able to prepare Nigerian children for a very competitive world and we have found that Nigerian children are not prepared; a lot of them are unemployable because they don’t have the right skills. So the whole idea is for us to come together and talk about these issues. Let us bring teacher, student, government, school owner etc. and talk about how we are going to make Nigerian children competitive so that they can get jobs. That is exactly what we are doing. So tis is basically on how to improve the private and government schools to ensure the Nigerian child is at the center of everything we are doing. It is not about the money but it is about can this child leave our schools and then get a job? This is so that we don’t keep giving jobs to foreigners. We are talking and brainstorming, during which every one will bring his/her own idea and after a while, we would have a document that we can tale forward and say okay this is what we have decided and that is why we invited aspirants because we are changing government, so we cannot be talking to old governments, so we are talking to PDP and APC because know those are the major ones and saying to them when you get to where you are going, make sure you listen to us and if you have t do anything about the children of tis nation, you have to engage the educators”, Osime noted.
Speaking further she said, ”We are involving the teachers here because they are very important They must see themselves as professionals and they must learn and continue to develop themselves and we are also trying to get the Nigerian teachers understand that these children lives, which is practically the future, is in your hands and you must do whatever you can do to make sure that this children have all the skills.”