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Henry Okonkwo
A concerned group, Human Development Initiative (HDI), has expressed worry over the dwindling interest of the Nigerian youths in the teaching profession, describing the trend as a huge threat to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG).
This is coming on the heels of celebration of this year’s World Teachers’ Day. In the statement signed by the HDI’s Executive Director, Mrs. Olufunso Owasanoye, the group stressed the need for state governments at all levels to ensure that teaching becomes a profession of choice for young people.
According to Owasanoye, the teaching profession needs to recruit 69 million new teachers to meet the 2030 SDG deadline. “There is a huge shortage of teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is affecting 70 percent of countries overall, and 90 per cent of countries at the secondary level”, she stated.
In order to make the teaching profession more attractive to the young ones, he said: “State government must deal with some key challenges of the teaching profession which include, but not limited to poor funding of public education system, inadequate remuneration of public school teachers especially basic education, lack of social security/poor service condition, poor teaching and learning environment, grossly inadequate instructional materials and infrastructure, inadequate training and training opportunities.”
He also decried political interference in teachers’ recruitment, obsolete curriculum, inferior entry criteria for acquiring teaching qualification, ineffective implementation of existing education policies and stagnation in the recruitment of professional teachers, among others.
