By Dennis Agbo

SOUTH Saharan Development Organization, a non-governmental agency, has unveiled an already prepared alternative for pupils and students to remain in studies following a lockdown of schools as a result of the Coronavirus outbreak in Nigeria.

South Saharan announced the alternative as ‘Radio School’ which it said, a pilot programme was conducted in two states of Enugu and Adamawa states in 2018.

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Executive Director of the agency, Dr Stanley Illechukwu in a press briefing, on Tuesday, said that the Radio School was initially designed to improve adolescents’ learning outcomes by providing high-quality curriculum-based lessons for junior secondary school, but could now be expanded to accommodate more classes and subjects.

Illechukwu, therefore, asked state government’s to partner with the organization to ensure that the emergency break in school attendance would not drastically affect pupils and students.

He noted that the choice in the use of Radio for the classes was because Radios are affordable to all classes of people with widespread reach.

“We strongly believe that this model could be implemented across the entire country and serve as a solution to the current education emergency.

“Our repository of classes for JSS2 can be used by those currently preparing for junior secondary school certificate examination,” Illechukwu said.

He stated that South Saharan is willing to provide technical assistance to any state that would want to implement the Radio School model to engage their students during the current emergency and anytime thereafter.

“We are also open to partners, who wish to support the scale-up of Radio School to cover other classes and subjects, most especially the classes that are scheduled to take Primary 6 Common Entrance, JSS3, SS3 and JAMB,” Illechukwu stated.

Vanguard