By Bianca Iboma
Former Secretary, National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof Peter Okebukola, has called for an all-round girl-child education in the country. He said out of the 121 million out-of-school children globally, girls constitute 65 million of the population, with over 80 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Okebukola made the appeal, while discussing the topic, Agenda for All-Round Girl-Child Education for Global Impact, at the speech and prize-giving ceremony of Queens College, Yaba, Lagos, held recently. The Minister of State for Education, Prof Anthony Gozie Anwukah, was the special guest of honour at the event.
The former NUC Secretary explained that women and girls all over the world have been stereotyped as being fit for domestic chores within the family, thereby widening the education gap between male and female gender. He noted that girls were often indoctrinated not to climb too high up the education ladder so as to get a man to marry.
“Denying the girl- child access to education implies making her a dysfunctional member of the society,” he said.
Okebukola called for the re-invigoration of the girl-child education project at the federal and state levels, providing incentives to states that have attained or surpassed annual minimum standards.
“Designate and differentially fund through UBEC, 12 schools (geopolitically distributed) as models for girl- child, all-round education in the country. One of the schools should be a unity school and the other owned by the state, with Queens College, Lagos representing the unity schools in the south-west,” he advised.
He also urged the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) to repackage the school curriculum and weed out its overloaded content. He suggested that all teacher preparation institutions should be directed from 2017, to begin a regime of training a new generation of teachers for implementing gender-inclusive, all-round education, especially at the basic school level.
Also speaking, Prof Anwukah expressed satisfaction with the quality of infrastructure and teaching in the college, as he commissioned new projects in the school, including, e-library block funded by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), School knowledge Centre donated by the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), among others.
The Director/Principal of the college, Mrs Lami Amodu, said the ceremony was a celebration of academic excellence and diligence among the students. She expressed the commitment of the College to quality education and sound training of the girl -child.