By Chris Ochayi
ABUJA—THE Federal Government, yesterday, unveiled a one-year strategic plan aimed at reinvigorating and repositioning the nation’s education sector for effective services delivery.

Minister of Education, Professor Ruqayyatu Rufai, who unveiled the document in Abuja, said the strategic document highlights the four focal areas of the roadmap for the education sector, which she said, include, access and equity, standards and quality assurance; technical and vocational education; training, funding and partnerships and resources utilization.

Institutional management of education

Prof. Rufai said that two additional focal areas had been added because of their critical importance, noting, “these are strengthening the institutional management of education and teacher education and development”.

She said: “The reason for us being here today is to inaugurate the strategy plan task teams that I have set up to exhaustively monitor and where necessary, provide guidance in the implementation of each area.

“There are, therefore, six teams with members drawn from within the Federal Ministry of Education, International Development partners, academia, the wider society and others involved in education and administration.

“These teams will provide regular reports to me and ensure that the timelines as provided in the strategy plan are followed. I appeal to members of the teams to be focused in carrying out their responsibilities.

This is an assignment that if properly carried out would impact positively on our society. You must therefore consider yourselves change agents.”

Terms of references handed to the task teams by the minister, include preparation of monthly work plan, in collaboration with the implementing departments, parastatals and relevant stakeholders.

Others are development of monitoring guide for the assessment of the implementation of initiatives; carrying out periodic monitoring exercises, using the monitoring guide, to track the implementation of the initiatives/activities set out in the strategy plan.

The task teams were also asked to identify challenges and gaps emanating from the monitoring report and make appropriate recommendations to the steering task team or any other appropriate stakeholders forum as may be convened by the minister.

Rufai added: “It is my hope that as we review our plan in the next few months, a number of milestones would have been achieved; I would like to be in a position to present accurate data on the state of Nigeria education to Nigerians and the outside world.

It is as result of this that the decentralization of the Education Management Information System, EMIS, is a key part of our plan. If we can have accurate data, it would help us to efficiently allocate our resources in the sector.”