A report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has indicated that no fewer than 1.5 million girls enrolled in schools in Bauchi, Katsina, Niger, Sokoto, Zamfara and Kano states in the last 10 years under the Girls Education Project Phase III, otherwise called GEP3.
The project which began in 2012 and ended in 2022 targeted one million girls and surpassed it with over 500,000 girls by household.
GEP3 is funded by Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), UK, through UNICEF and implemented by the federal and state governments of Nigeria.
In the report of an evaluation of the project presented on Thursday in Kaduna, the In-Charge of UNICEF, Kaduna Field Office, Dr Idris Baba, noted that the success of the project could be attributed to adopting a comprehensive societal approach.
He said it could be considered as a wide range of social, psychosocial, cultural, and economic factors that affect girls’ education.
The project aimed to improve access, enrolment, retention, and learning outcomes for girls in basic education in the six northern states.
The findings revealed that 23,655 girls benefited from the cash transfer program and more than 67,000 teachers and Integrated Qur’anic Schools (IQS) facilitators were trained, which improved teaching competency from 12 per cent to 52 per cent.
The report also showed that 2.6 million children continued education through alternate learning during the COVID-19 where back-to-school campaigns conducted in 18,567 schools resulted in 94 per cent of children returning to school.
The report further showed that more than 3,800 schools and IQS implemented the Reading and Numeracy Activity (RANA) with improvement in foundational literacy.
Also, the functionality of Schools Based Management Committees (SBMC) and Community-Based Management Committees (CBMCs) increased from 30 per cent to 80 per cent with whole school development plans.
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Teaching competency, Schools Based Management Committees (SBMC) and Community Based Management Committees (CBMCs) and girl enrollment could serve as the project indicators in the six northern states.
The plans included activities on girls’ enrolment and retention which increased from 45 per cent to 67 per cent.
The report further revealed that the integration has been implemented across Bauchi and Niger to varying degrees; 22% of the GEP3 IQSs contacted for the baseline survey were non-integrated and 14% had been integrated for less than one year. Among the surveyed schools, IQSs were integrated on average for two years in Bauchi and three years in Niger.
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Few IQSs provide all five core subjects of the integrated curriculum in the early grades. Thirty interviews with head teachers indicate that only 12% of IQSs teach mathematics, Hausa, English, basic sciences and social sciences, while English and mathematics are provided in around 90% of IQSs
Chart showing Core subjects taught in IQSs
Hausa is the most common language of instruction but often various languages were used in teaching during the same class. In Bauchi, the majority of facilitators (72%) used just one language during the lesson observation. A further 24% were observed using two languages.
In Niger, 25% of facilitators used just one language during the lesson, while 60% used two languages. A small minority of facilitators in both states used three or more languages during a lesson. The majority of facilitators in both states were observed using Hausa at least once during the lesson (100% in Bauchi and 72% in Niger)
