The Nigerian government has announced plans to reopen schools for the first time since March, when schools across the country were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The move comes after the government partially reopened secondary schools in August to allow students take their exit examinations.
Before the pandemic, Nigeria’s education sector was already beset with many problems, with 10.5 million children not going to school, mostly in the North.
Issues like gender discrimination, disasters and armed conflict, language challenges, household poverty, child labour, and child marriage have contributed to depriving many Nigerian children of their right to access quality education.
Since the onset of COVID-19, millions of children in Nigeria have been stuck at home not learning. For vulnerable and disadvantaged children, the impact has been worse.
There is now a real risk that millions of children forced out-of-school by the pandemic won’t ever return. Globally, according to Save the Children, education cuts and rising poverty as a result of COVID-19 could force almost 10 million children out of school forever by the end of this year alone.
After Nigeria's federal government ordered schools to shut, state governments have taken different approaches to the in-person learning problem. Lagos State, for example, launched a radio learning programme and distributed radios to low-income families. However, millions of public university and secondary school students across the country, most of whom are from low-income families, have not received any kind of support during this time.
Startups like uLesson have also launched e-learning solutions but the least impacted segment of the Nigerian education sector has been private schools and universities. According to TechCabal, Babcock, Covenant, American University of Nigeria, Crawford University, and Mountain Top University have all developed e-learning alternatives. For 102 million Nigerians who live in extreme poverty, however, these options are out of reach and simply unaffordable.
Evidently, a huge amount of support is required to ensure that more children don’t remain out-of-school due to the impact of the pandemic.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, millions of children in our country have been trapped at home and unable to study. Children in some areas are unable to perform e-learning due to difficult conditions, which will cause difficulties in student education. Many people support the reopening of educational institutions, but considering that COVID-19 has not yet ended and some countries have as many as 6 million cases of infection, we cannot relax. Children are very fragile, so we should be more cautious!