By Adesina Wahab

The Executive Secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, Dr Aisha Garba, has said that when communities see educational institutions in their localities as their own and are ready to ensure their sustenance, challenges such as insecurity in schools, the menace of out-of-school children, OSC, and others would be solved.

According to her, the participation of communities in the way the schools are run would also help promote basic education.

She stated this in Lagos on Tuesday during the opening ceremony of a three-day training and retraining of state and non-state actors on the revised School-Based Management Committee, SBMC, operational documents in Ikeja, Lagos.

The UBEC Executive Secretary was represented by the Deputy Executive Secretary (Technical), Mr Rasaq Olajuwon Akinyemi, and the training was organised in conjunction with the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF.

“By design, SBMCs serve as the vital bridge between schools and their communities. They foster accountability, transparency, and inclusivity in school governance. They decentralise decision-making, giving schools the autonomy to address their unique challenges by leveraging indigenous resources and specific community strengths.

“However, to remain effective, our frameworks must evolve. Today, we are here to operationalise the next phase of this evolution. UBEC, in close collaboration with UNICEF, has recently revised three operational documents:

The SBMC Operational Manual; the Guidelines for Monitoring and Mentoring of SBMCs in Nigeria; and the SBMC-School Improvement Plan (SIP) Implementation Manual.

“These revisions were meticulously crafted to align with emerging educational priorities, address current grassroots challenges, and reflect global best practices. Over the next three days, our objective is to ensure that you, as the critical intermediaries between the Commission and the schools, have an in-depth of these updated frameworks,” she said.

She described the SBMCs as critical drivers tasked with mobilising resources, building strategic partnerships, and aggressively advocating for the enrolment of out-of-school children, among others.

She hinged the future of education in Nigeria on the ability of all stakeholders to be actively involved in the decision-making processes that affect our schools. “By strengthening the SBMCs, we are laying the groundwork for a more inclusive, equitable, and quality education system.”

In her remarks, the Education Specialist, UNICEF, Nneka Ogbansiegbe, opined that the participation of communities in education is key for success to be achieved.

“Apart from helping to solve some challenges in the education sector, they help to promote basic education. They also have a great role to play in ensuring that budgetary allocations to the education sector are judiciously used. This training is intended to keep them up to date in the roles expected of them,” she said.

She expressed the readiness of UNICEF to partner with UBEC in the bid to provide accessible and quality education for the Nigerian child.

The National Chairman of SBMC – Alhaji Umar Abdullahi (Wazirin Gwandu), commended UBEC and UNICEF for organising the training programme.

He gave the assurance that SBMCs would not derelict in the discharge of their duties.

“We are also ready to take charge of our schools and see them as our own. Anyway, they are our own; our children attend those schools, and we cannot afford to treat what is ours with levity. I have gone round the country, and I can see the peculiar problems of each zone. In the North, we can mention the issue of out-of-school children, and in the Southeast, more girls go to school than boys,” he said.

One of the resource persons, Dr Hafsat Yakasai of Bayero University, Kano, BUK, emphasised the need for workers in the Social Mobilisation Department of UBEC to work hand in hand with the SBMCs.

The training is coming on the heels of a similar one held in Kano which had participants from the 19 Northern States.