The news that Kano state is making moves to stop the misclassification of Tsangaya, Islamiyya Learners as Out-of-School children, OOS is indeed one stop shop towards correcting the erroneous and inconclusive OOS figures in use in the country.
The UN, its agencies like UNICEF, UNESCO and other education stakeholders in the country and beyond have continued to exaggerate and misclassify the various components of the out-of-school children, OOS in the country.
According to data from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Nigeria has the highest rate of out-of-school children with at least 10.5million in the world. Such figures have come about in total exclusion of Dr. Auwal Halilu, Co-Chair of the Kano State Accountability Forum on Education (KSAFE), said the forum was convened to discuss how best to implement the policy recently approved by the state government.
According to him, the policy seeks to harmonise all non-state schools under a unified framework covering curriculum, textbooks, data management, and quality assurance.
He explained that the policy is expected to improve literacy rates by integrating non-formal learning centres into the mainstream education system.
“Someone who attends a non-formal school is still counted as out-of-school child because of lack of reliable data. With this plan, once Tsangaya and Islamiyya systems offer literacy and numeracy, their learners will also be counted as literate. This will reduce illiteracy drastically,” he said.
Nigeria has one of the highest numbers of out-of-school children in the world, with estimates ranging from 10.5 million to 20 million depending on the age group included.
Regretably, however, formal learners in formal Islamiyya and informal Qur’anic schools (tsangaya) have been considered as OOS children. This is not only unfair, unjust but also a deliberate effort to respectively underate the formal and informal islamiyya and quranic school learners and the system.
In the spirit of inclusiveness, both the informal and formal Islamic education learners must be removed from the OOS children figures.
Contributing factors to OOS are, but not limited to, insecurity, poverty, economic barriers, child marriage, and lack of infrastructure.
Others include general lack of accessible schools, socio-cultural norms and health and development issues.
