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Doris Obinna
As the world commemorates the International Youth Day 2019 with the theme “Transforming education,” the Mothers and Marginalised Advocacy (MAMA) Centre has demand increased priority towards inclusive and equitable access to education by the youth in Nigeria, as enshrined under Goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In a statement released by the Executive Director, Ola Onyegbula, stated that half of youth between the ages of 15 and 17 in sub-Saharan Africa (with Nigeria included) are not in school, totalling more than 93 million children and youth of primary and secondary school ages out of school across the region, as reported by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
“We find more worrisome that in at least 15 million children that will never set foot in a classroom, girls face the biggest barriers.
“We are not unaware that about 17 million Nigerian children and youths do not have access to education and many more are without access to good education despite the growing importance of quality education to individual personal development and socio-economic prosperity.”
While reports have showed that girls are particularly disadvantaged across sub-Saharan Africa with 9 million girls who will never attend school compared to 6 million boys, this disadvantage, according to Global Education Monitoring Report, starts at an early age in the region, where 23 per cent of all girls compared to 19 per cent of all boys are out of primary school. Onyegbula said.
