UNICEF partners media to boost school enrollment in Nigeria

United Nations Children’s Fund UNICEF has concluded plans to collaborate with the media and its practitioners to ensure high increase of school enrollment in Nigeria which has 10.5 million out of school.

This was part of the agreements reached at the 2017 National Enrollment Campaign Planning Meeting with heads of media agencies aimed at building a collective responsibility for reaching out of school children in the country which is currently at alarming rate.

The meeting has discovered large number of children out of school majority girls, low child registration and inadequate infrastructure and educational facilities especially in public schools in Nigeria just as non implementation of Universal Basic Education Commission UBEC act also contributed to the problems.

The communique reached at the end of the meeting called for a closer collaboration between the UNICEF and media to curb the menace while urging UNICEF to embarked on high level advocacy to federal, states and local government and private owned media houses to established partnership.

Meanwhile, the print media should begin to write articles, special reports and features on the alarming rate of the out of school children and how to curb the situation especially the future consequences.

This was organized by federal ministry of education, UBEC in partnership with UNICEF Nigeria on ‘girl education project phase 3’ which had agreed on the roles and share responsibility of each of the stakeholders.

Head of media UNICEF, Mallam Rabiu Musa expressed satisfaction over the response from the ten participating states of the federation, saying that Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan are unlikely to meet the target of education for all children by 2020 if nothing is done now.

While charging for the registration of children in Nigeria be given priority to enabled it have proper planning hence about 70per cent of children in Nigeria are not registered at birth with 25 million out of school comprising 15 million girls and 10 million boys in the country hence to increased the enrollment of girl child in Nigeria.

The participated states at the meeting includes: Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Katsina, Bauchi, Adamawa, Yobe, Zamfara, Kaduna and Eboyin while this year’s expanded meeting has the legislators, political office holders, traditional rulers, religious clerics and the media because the major reasons for out of school in Nigeria were poverty, distance, preference and socio cultural norms and practices that must be tackled head on.