State Education Programme Investment Project (SEPIP) and the Nigerian Partnership for Education Project (NIPEP), a partnership between the Federal Ministry of Education and the World Bank have made remarkable progress in education delivery in Nigeria, Minister of Education, Mr. Adamu Adamu, has said.
The minister said this in Abuja at a one-day meeting of the joint National Steering Committee of the two projects.
Adamu, who was represented by the Minister of State for Education, Professor Anthony Anwukah said the project was fast achieving the objectives of addressing the out of school children challenge and low education quality arising from difficulty in teacher deployment to critical areas.
“Progress on implementation so far is reasonable,” he said.
According to him, SEPIP is operational in three states namely: Anambra, Bauchi and Ekiti with the sole objective of improving school performance through teacher availability in core subject of mathematics, English and the sciences.
To achieve the objective, the participating states have used the grants from Development Partners to introduce special incentives for teachers posted to schools that are ‘hard to staff’ as Ekiti State describes it.
On the other hand, the minister said the issue of out of school children, especially girls was also being addressed in the five NIPEP states namely Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna and Jigawa through the provision of scholarships for girls and female teachers.
He said a total of 1,528 female teachers in Kaduna, Sokoto and Jigawa have received scholarships to pursue NCE programmes, while Katsina State and Kano State have 935 female teachers awaiting to benefit.
The idea of the scholarship for female teachers, the minister said, is to create models for female pupils in the communities, adding that the project has led to considerable improvement in the external examination in the participating states.
