By Ezra Ukanwa, Abuja

AS efforts to ensure an all-round development in the country’s education sector continues, Civil Society Organizations, CSOs, in a report, fingered insignificant budgetary allocation to basic education and poor educational infrastructures as major banes of quality basic education in many states.

The report, launched by Riplington Education Initiatives in partnership with Youth Hub Africa, and Christian Aid, on Tuesday, in Abuja, aimed at investigating the quality of infrastructures, basic education and teachers.

Speaking on the findings of the report during its launch, on Tuesday, in Abuja, the lead consultant, REI, Blessing Tarfa, disclosed that about 29 states in Nigeria suffer poor infrastructures as many of the students were not able to read and write, according to the report.

She said that many states are hardly making efforts to ensure that the educational status of the state is adequately improved.

Tarfa said: “The project basic ranking was basically just to assess how the states are faring in providing quality education within their states in Nigeria. So, we had to do a selection of indicators of quality education and classified them into the inputs they made by the states and what is now the outcome.

“So, the inputs are basically the infrastructure, the teachers that are available in the schools, and then the outcome is the learning outcomes. So, foundational reading skills and foundational numeracy skills were the outcomes. And in between, we also had some extra indicators, like the attendance, the completion rates, and then the transition rates.

“For the budget allocation, according to UNESCO, 15 per cent of the budget should go into education. So, we cut it back from seven per cent to 2.5 per cent in our assessment, but 29 states are not meeting it. Some were as low as 0.2% of their budget goes to education. For every teacher there should be 35 learners but for the one toilet there should be 25 users but we had the highest toilet ratio, very shocking 890 learners to one toilet. Then, we had as high as 500 in some cases for qualified teachers ratio and for the classroom we also had as high as 500 and we had as low as 31. So, there is indication that education is very low in these states.”

Speaking, the Executive Director, YouthHubAfrica, Rotimi Olawale, while bemoaning the current state of basic education in some of the states, called on state governors to as a matter of urgency invest massively in quality basic education.

He said: “From what we have looked at, I feel states met all the indicators used for the ranking and I think that was about six indicators and that for me is very low because these indicators are basic. We want the state to reach the indicators and pass it. If you have taught students before, managing a class of 35 pupils can be very challenging so even a state meeting that requires one teacher to 35 students is not ideal, we want our states to go beyond that.

“A few states are meeting the requirements. Many states are below meeting the requirements. And for us, this is not a name and shame government. We want the state governments to use this as a tool to see how they can improve quality education to say it’s not just about building infrastructures, we have commissioned a new classroom because I think that’s the wave that we’re seeing. With state governors across Nigeria.

“No, you need to ask yourself are the learners learning. If you do all of that, and the learners are not learning, then we’re not doing enough and that’s why we want to provide this ranking as an advocacy tool for us to also hold the government accountable to providing quality education for students.”

Speaking on the way to go on educational development, the Advocacy Manager, Palladium, Laz Apir, said: “I think all the stakeholders from the local government to the federal government need to declare a state of emergency in our primary education. And when we talk about a state of emergency it means all resources must not be held back. Attention governors should be out in the field inspecting what has been done in terms of provisioning of these facilities.”