ARMSTRONG ALLAHMAGANI, Bauchi
A Non-Governmental Organization, Connected Development, has partnered the Bauchi State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), in training 187 school administrators in a bid to address the decay in the state’s education sector.
The Project, ‘Learn to Read,’ is being sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and is aimed at improving early-grade reading by leveraging community support and advocacy for education.
It also seeks to enhance citizen participation by establishing a School Monitoring Team responsible for ensuring effective service delivery to increase demands while setting the citizen’s monitoring framework using relevant data; strengthen existing community structures and stakeholders such as School Based Management Committee (SBMC), community based organizations, and Associations to be directly linked to reports on State Universal Basic Education activities on basic education; and strengthen linkages between the government, citizens, legislatures, and traditional institutions on better service delivery in the education sector.
The participants at the 3-day training held across the three Senatorial Districts of the State were drawn from the SBMCs of each of the 20 LGA in the State.
They comprise of the SBMC Chairman, representative of Mothers’ Association, traditional Leader, retired educationist, two religious leaders (Christian/Muslim) and a member of Youth community based association/organization in every LGA.
Speaking in an interview with journalists in Azare, Katagum LGA, venue of the training for the Bauchi North District, the Programmes Officer, Connected Development, Abdulazeez Hussaini, said that the training is aimed at explaining and guiding the participants through their roles and responsibilities as SBMCs and SMTs, resource mobilization and management, how to track these resources using Follow The Money Process as well as routine school monitoring.
“The importance of this training and what we want to see is a school where all community members see themselves as stakeholders, where the child going to school gets all the necessary resources and materials for him to learn in the most conducive environment, the teacher being able to teach with all the necessary resources in the most conducive environment, a secured environment for our children and younger ones and a more responsive system that responds to queries from the community, that responds to queries from the teachers who are within the school and from within the students.
“We want to see a more robust engagement in the education sector where everybody sees the sector as their personal responsibility and then tomorrow we can be proud that we now have a world class standard of education system in Nigeria.
“A people’s problem require a people’s solution, so these people have looked into their system and seen what their problems are, they’ve raised the issues of the problems and then, as SBMCs and SMTs, we want a bottom-up kind of approach. If the top-bottom approach is no longer working, let’s do it from the bottom up.
“You go to these schools through your relationship with that place, identify what the issues are and give the feedback to the relevant communities because these people who are in the position of authority in the education sector will not be in those places without those communities.
“It is because there are communities where there are students and there are parents who take their children to school, that is why you have the education sector. As such, if you as a community can raise these issues, I’m sure it will be a stronger weapon for the people at the top to respond to.”
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