By Fortune Eromosele – Abuja

In its recent data, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, UNICEF, pegged Nigeria’s out-of-school children to 18.5 million.

Senior Special Adviser to the Vice President on Economic matters, Yosola Akinbi, in this interview with Vanguard, shares how Nigeria can rank high in World Bank’s human capital index by taking children back to school.

Excerpts;

How do we move Nigeria away from the World Bank’s ranking of 152 out of 157 on human capital index?

It involves government recognising that it is important for Nigeria to move forward, set up this working group consisting of different partners, the federal government, the state and all having one purpose to accelerate human capital development in Nigeria.

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Our approach should be two phases, the first phase is let us exactly understand what we are trying to do and what we did is to actually define the vision, the vision of what we are trying to do. We have six focal areas we are focussing on right now, and in the midst of all that we also have preliminary lists of intervention that has been identified.

For Nigeria we have defined human capital development in three main thematic areas, which is health, education and labour force participation. For health we’ve chosen five critical interventions and for education also they are five including labour force.

For health, we said that it is important to operationalize the basic healthcare provision fund and the second intervention is to able to launch the free family planning programs. And we think that it is important to launch effective financing mechanism also for health.

Recognising that health cannot happen in Isolation without the human resources also, we think that we need to focus on the recruitment and training of health workers especially the community ones recognising that we must spread health all across including at the community level.

We also know that the private sector also has a good role to play in that. Those are the five critical ones that we identified for critical interventions for health.

Let me just make it clear that we said the interventions must happen in the states and not just at the federal.

In education intervention we said there’s a need to revise the curriculum of what is being thought and the methodology of teaching and also improve professional development and performance of these teachers.

For the labour force, we recognised that the youth participation is important and also improve access to job market. The SMEs support is one of the things we are paying attention to by providing credit system at very low interest rate and we should also be able to assist them technically.

We are in the face of global competition, no one lowers the standard for any country, how can Nigerians excel when education, health care and other development projects is not in tandem with what’s obtainable outside Nigeria?

We said that human capital development plays a critical role in improving economic development and that of course translates in making sure that the lives of the people are better for it.

That is why the core working group was set up, to make sure that we gave a process for accelerating human capital development, that is health, education and labour force participation.

When we do all these, the productivity of the average Nigerian child will move forward, so that Nigeria is not down there. From 2019 it was 34 percent we moved slightly, but we need to get up to 50, 60 percent, it is doable.

When we have productivity level for a Nigerian child to be about 50 percent, then we say we are dealing essentially with poverty. It is something that we have to do.

It is not just about government, it is actually a collective thing, that’s why we are working with all the partners.

Government recognises these and we are actually starting from the simplest way, and saying to the states launch a community project, so that you will make them aware of what they need to do, the basic thing to make sure that we have children in school.

The rate of out-of-school children is really alarming and we need to make children go to school. And it starts with the community, so we are encouraging states to launch that program so that the chiefs, traditional rulers, are all involved. They are the ones that know all the children that are not going to school.

The very basic primary healthcare system, let’s begin to make it work, so that we are all part of this process. And in that process also, we are using the people, the children the young people in the communities and exposing them to the job market, so that they are working in their communities and gaining experience.

We want to make sure that the productivity level of the average child in Nigeria that’s born, goes up to about 50, 60 percent. And that saying that we do not want to be back home, we want our children to go to school, we want our children to be healthy, we want our children to have the basic things of life, so that when they join the labour market, they won’t be backward.

The UNICEF recently released a figure that about 18.5 million children are out of school in Nigeria, what’s the target, how are we looking at the human development, where do we want to get it to by 2030?

The out-of-school children in Nigeria is one of the things we are focusing on and the vision that we have in terms of target, we said it is important for us to see how we are going to reduce the out-of-school children by at least 70 percent.

We have a vision page. That vision page exactly tells us what we are trying to achieve. In terms of primary school enrolment we want to double it from 46 percent to 90 percent by the 2030. Specifically focusing on doubling female enrolment.

We also said we need to double secondary school completion rate, because we found out that it is not just about getting into secondary school, especially the girls, they do not complete secondary school. And so we think that we need to double it from 40 to 80 percent.

Of course it is not just about getting this children in school, it is also very important to actually improve the outcomes, that is why we need to achieve the 80 percent pass rate for students. That’s why we are working also on the teachers, and the teachers education as well.

It’s really a sour point for us as Nigerians. It is really very important for us to play our own part of it. We are all part of a community, wherever you live you need to find out why children are not going to school.

Yes the state and all have a role to play by providing the basic infrastructure so that these children can go to school but we also have a role to make sure we are part of it.

Perhaps we need to go back to where we all come from, we need to find out why children are not going to school and encourage them to see how we can have a support process also to make sure that children go to school.

We want to have 24 million additionally healthy, educated and productive Nigerians serving and not stunted. We want to have educated and productive Nigerians entering the labour market by 2030.

It’s very ambitious but I think we must come from that high level to see how we would participate, contribute and be part of the process to ensure Nigeria moves forward by 2030.

Nigeria’s productivity level should be at least 50, 55 percent by 2030.

Vanguard News Nigeria