The Federal Government on Monday said it plans to enroll about 2. 9 million pupils annually in four years to reduce the figure of out-of-school children in Nigeria.
Nigeria currently has the highest number of out of school children in the world with 11. 4 million out–of–school children out of the 20 million worldwide.
The Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, said 60 per cent of the 11.4 million out-of-school children in Nigeria are girls.
Adamu, who said this at the presentation of “Education for change,” a Ministerial Strategic Plan (2016-2019) to stakeholders in Abuja, said only 3.1 million or 17 per cent nomadic children of school-age had access to basic education despite decades of intervention.
He therefore said government would urgently raise the national Net Enrollment Rate (NER) to ensure that all out-of-school children are enrolled in basic education schools in the next four years.
The minister said: “Nigeria has the highest number of out of school children in the world with 11. 4 million out- of-school children of the 20 million worldwide.
These include the girl-child, Almajiri-child, children of nomadic pastoralists and migrant fishermen and more recently the children displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency.
“60 per cent of the 11.4 million out-of-school children in Nigeria are girls. Only a fraction (17 per cent) of the 3.1 million nomadic children of school-age has access to basic education despite decades of intervention. Similarly, only a small proportion of the FME’s 20120 estimate of 9.5 million Almajiri children have access to any form of basic education.”
