…Edo only sub-national invited to confab in Sierra Leone, as African leaders hail
Reforms by the Governor Godwin Obaseki-led administration to transform Edo’s basic education sector and tackle learning poverty, has again, gotten global recognition, taking the centre stage at the first-ever Foundational Learning Exchange (FLEX) Summit organized by African education stakeholders.
The Summit held at the Freetown International Conference Centre, in Sierra Leone, gathered ministers and other stakeholders from several African countries, including Cote d’Ivoire, the Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria and Rwanda, as well as over 80 foreign partners/donors.
Edo was the only sub-national invited as a state to the Africa education summit and continues to stand out as a sub-national that is demonstrating strong political will and action to accelerate foundational literacy and numeracy.
Sharing insights on how the government has transformed the basic education sector to tackle learning poverty, the Executive Chairman of Edo State Universal Basic Education Board (Edo SUBEB), Mrs. Ozavize E. Salami, said the Obaseki-led State Government remains committed to improving learning outcomes and is investing hugely to accelerate and sustain the gains recorded in the sector.
She said, “We have a governor that has been aggressive in his basic education reforms. So, over the years of the basic transformation programme, we have trained over 15, 400 teachers and upskilled them in modern teaching and learning pedagogy. The programme has also focused on the use of digital instructional materials. All the teachers use tablets and scripted lessons across every local government area in the state, including the hard-to-reach communities.
“We also focused on elaborate monitoring and evaluation machinery for the programme because it was important for us to track individual pupils. So, for every child in our programme, we are able to track their performance and progress. We are able to look at areas that need improvements and feed them back into the ways the lessons are created. This is to ensure that we are able to check if the programme is on track so that we can measure our learning outcomes.”
The Edo SUBEB chair added, “Three years after the programme, based on our evaluation, we saw that the average Edo child was closer to the international reading performance level of 110 words per minute, which is way higher than the Nigerian average. We are currently improving the programme, especially with a view to domesticating it.”
