Imo, Ekiti has the lowest out-of-school children in Nigeria.
Imo and Ekiti rank the lowest among states with out-of-school children in the country.
They have one percent and two percent of such children, according to United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF).
UNICEF’s Chief of Measurement for Results (M4R), Claes Johanson gave the figures yesterday at a two-day media dialogue on the Indicators Cluster Survey 6 (MIC6) Results in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.
Also, the 2018 statistics indicated that Abia, Kwara, Enugu, Bayelsa, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and Ekiti were topping other states with the lowest number of out-of-school children.
Johanson said 27 percent of children, aged seven to 14 years, had foundational reading skills while only 25 percent were with foundational numeracy skills.
The UNICEF official noted that the MIC6 had helped in fishing out data in every sector that would help in analyzing how things were working and why they were not working.
He said: “The lowest out-of-school rates are found in Ekiti (two percent), and Imo (one percent). The highest rates are in Kebbi (65 percent), Zamfara (61 percent), and Bauchi (61 percent).”
According to him, the figures indicate that Nigeria has not seen improvement in the number of out-of-school in the past five years and should begin to improve in this area.
The data on the 2018 Digest of Basic Education Statistics by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) showed that Kano, Akwa Ibom, Katsina, Kaduna, Taraba, Sokoto, Yobe, Zamfara, and Bauchi were having the highest figures.
“The MIC6 cleared many things. In education and health, we’ve seen some of the most important findings. There is good news. We’ve seen that fewer children under five were dying.
“A large percentage of this is driven by an increase in immunisation. So, we had only 34 percent of children immunized five years ago. But now, we have 57 percent, which calls for celebration. It is something we should be happy about.”
“We also see that there is room for improvement everywhere, particularly in education. For the first time, we are looking at children that are learning, and we see that only 25 percent have foundational numeracy. One out of four children does not even go to school. So, the number of out-of-school children is still one in four, and that’s the same as five years ago.”
“So, continuing education is the most important thing,” he said.
