The Gombe State Government has lauded the intervention of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in tackling the out-of-school children menace in the state.
The Commissioner for Education, Dr Aishatu Maigari stated this in an interview with journalists at a two-day workshop organised by State Universal Basic Education with support from UNICEF Bauchi Field Office on policy dialogue with relevant education stakeholders on addressing out-of-school phenomenon and development of an action plan.
She noted that enrolment is a collaborative effort.
Maigari said, “You find out that when a party is not doing what they should do whether the government or the community, it will result in gaps in the menace of out-of-school children.
She called for concerted efforts in curbing the phenomenon saying, “We are calling for more collaboration from all the stakeholders in education”.
While decrying the rate of out-of-school children in the state, especially following the geographical location of Gombe, Maigari added, “Because of the relative peace in Gombe, we have had so many influxes of people who are coming to find refuge in Gombe.
“You see the strain on our facilities; if you budget for 20 pupils in our school you find out that we have 50 because 30 are not from Gombe. That is just a hypothetical number.
“The governor since he assumed office in 2019, declared a state of emergency in the education sector. In the last five years, since 2019, we have 550,000 and what they have given us is over 700,000 children”.
Also speaking, the UNICEF Education Specialist, Bauchi Field Office, Abdulrahman Ibrahim, said the workshop followed the development of a policy framework on education at the national level.
He said, “We are here to domesticate the national framework. The two-day work is for us to see how we can domesticate it at the state level. What we are doing now is to develop an action plan on how to reduce the rate of out-of-school children”.
