Parents, caregivers and pupils have presented myriads of problems affecting effective education delivery in their communities to the state government at a townhall meeting organised by Save The Children, with State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) in attendance.
The event which took place at Ajingi Local Government in Kano on Wednesday also saw in attendance, politicians, traditional and religious leaders.
Addressing news men at the close of the event, the Social Behavior Change Manager of Save The Children, Ibrahim Haruna said they are providing an opportunity for the communities to interface with the authorities and policy makers and to address issues of sociocultural norms affecting education delivery.
Ajingi, Makoda and Minjibir are the selected local government areas from Kano that top the list of communities with out of school children where the PLANE project of Save The Children is taking place.
Some of the identified problems include lack of school teachers, inadequate learning facilities like infrastructure and teaching and learning materials as well as behavioral patterns that affect the education delivery in the communities.
The government is therefore called upon to address them in order to enhance the standard of education in the affected communities.
“We are her today to conduct a town hall meeting this is a community led advocacy where community members interface directly with the government and policy makers.
“As you can see we have senior officials from the state ministry of education, the State Universal Basic Education SUBEB, and all other agencies like the local government chairman and the district head, tradition and and religious leaders.
“This is an opportunity for communities to come and showcase what they are doing and how the work of save the children under the Plane project has been able to straighten the capacities of the communities to organize themselves for collective actions.
“This is aimed at ensuring that we address the issue of sociocultural norms and other issues of accessibility which deny children access to education
“So the entire goal of what we want to do is that communities are able to be heard. First of all they present the key successes achievements of the work they are doing under what we call the community access circle which he communities are working to exploit, develop and implement actions, they are here today to Present the the achievement of those actions to the government.
“As you can see they have achieved a lot in terms of how they have mobilized resources and address some of the challenges. They have also presented to the government the support they need that include the issue of inadequate teacher, inadequate schools and learning materials. He stated.
On her part, Kano SUBEB Acting Board Secretary, Amina Umar said the delegation from SUBEB are at the town hall meeting to witness the activities of the Save The Children who are working in Kano State.
“So far we are very impressed with what has happened from the beginning to the end. All the stakeholders you can see from their presentations that there is commitment especially from the Local Government to support the project.
“Save The Children intervention is in line with Kano State Government priority in addressing the issue of Out-Of-School children in the state which is one of our major challenges and so far we have seen that there is a lot of improvement made.
“They are trying to scale up and the successes recorded in Ajingi informed the decision to scale up with the additional Local Government in Minjibir.”
