The Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) convened a one-day consultative meeting of education administrators from the six states of the Northeast. The meeting held on August 8, 2019, at Flourish Hotel, Gombe, Gombe State.
The meeting started at 10: 00 am with opening prayers and the participants introduced themselves. Isah Garba briefed the participants on the objectives of the meeting which were: to galvanize the stakeholders on how the objectives of the SACE project which was on Improving Social Accountability in the Education Sector of the states will be fully achieved after the grant and share with the stakeholders CITAD initiative of conducting the first Education Conference n the Northeast as a move to generate stakeholders input and contributions in solving the problems of the education sector in the region.
He stated that the meeting was part of the CITAD initiative to move forward from where its project of Social accountability in the education sector supported by USAID/SACE stopped so that the gains of the project could be sustained and to ensure that initiatives started in during the life of the project were taken to the logical conclusion.
Furthermore, it was also to present to the stakeholders the concept of the Northeast education, Books conference, and Exhibition (NEBECE) and solicit the contributions of the participants on how the conference will be more successful and achieve its desired goals.
After the presentation on the concept of the conference, the participants made some observations on a different aspect of the conference. These observations are:
1. Most of the interventions in the education sector are only targeted toward basic and tertiary education while the secondary schools’ education is not given the desired consideration. Therefore, it is important that the conference also draws the attention of the stakeholders on that.
2. The poor capacity of the teachers is one of the identified problems of the sector in the region, so, there should be a topic on the importance of building teachers’ capacity in improving the educational standards of the region.
3. Another area that needs to be discussed is the issue of quality assurance through monitoring and evaluation.
4. A traditional or very high-profile community leader should be invited to make a presentation on the role of community involvement in running the education sectors
It was also observed that:
Most of the new state governors have the political will of revamping the education sector especially Yobe that just conducted its education summit and committees have been set up to identify the needs of different sectors of education to effective intervention.
In Gombe also a similar initiative is on-going and if the new executive will continue as they are doing now things will be good for the sector.
Recommendations
There should be advocacy visits by CITAD to the new executives to sensitize them on how to leverage cooperate social responsibilities of corporate organizations in their states and also to brief them the conference.
More stakeholders should be brought in, therefore CITAD should extend the invitation to:
1. UNICEF
2. USAID
3. UNESCO
4. UKAID
5. EU
Attendance
1. Bauchi: Permanent Secretaries of Ministry of Education and SUBEB
2. Gombe: Permanent Secretaries of Ministry of Education and SUBEB
3. Yobe: Permanent Secretary of Ministry of Education
4. Adamawa: representative of Ministry of Education
5. UBEC: Deputy Regional Director
6. Two CSOs from Gombe
7. Professor Amina Kaidal