Nigeria has Devised System that’ll Work in Education Sector, Says Sanwo-Olu

By Segun James

Lagos State Governor, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has said that Nigeria doesn’t need to copy e-learning educational solutions from other climes, adding that the country has devised a system that will work well for the nation’s education sector.

The governor, who said this at the Ekiti Investment and Economic Summit held in Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State, said that this could become a national educational policy.

Sanwo-Olu, while highlighting the importance of peer reviews among governors and public officials in a panel of discussants alongside Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo and Governors Godwin Obaseki of Edo State, Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti as well as Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, disclosed that Lagos borrowed the idea of its e-education intervention, EKOEXCEL from Edo State.

He said that Governor Obaseki introduced EdoBEST during his first term, adding that Lagos, having studied it carefully, went the same route with the same technical partner in 2019.

Sanwo-Olu said: “I usually acknowledge Governor Obaseki because I copied something that he introduced during his first tenure and which is working three times in Lagos, education. He started EdoBEST, and he brought in Bridge (New Globe), an e-learning solution provider with tablets for basic education.

“So, you can see that indeed, we have started doing peer review. You don’t need to go to another country to copy what is working well in our country already. He brought the initiative, and we said we also need to start with basic education. We have copied that from Edo; it’s working well in Lagos, and we’ll scale it up.”

Highlighting some of its other benefits, the governor said: “We can check from the tablet what attendance we have in our schools, which teacher has come in; what time they clock in and what are the lesson notes. You can design the same curriculum irrespective of which part of the state the schools are in, so you can have the same quality in terms of input and the expected outcomes from education.”

Bridge, now rebranded as New Globe, is the technical partner managing the programme with the Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) having oversight functions.

Governor Sanwo-Olu inaugurated EKOEXCEL in 2019 as part of his THEMES agenda, to provide quality education to both the rich and the poor across the state and upskill teachers leveraging cutting-edge technology.

In line with the governors’ outlined achievements for his second year in office campaign, the programme has accelerated pupils’ learning, which has led to better classroom culture and more robust curriculum management.

EKOEXCEL has dramatically accelerated student literacy and numeracy performances, with significant differences between student performances in EKOEXCEL schools versus their peers in traditional schools.

EKOEXCEL students advanced in numeracy twice as fast as students in traditional schools, as at the same time, they progressed three times as quickly as their peers in comparable schools.

“It’s an exciting time for education in Lagos and Nigeria as a whole with President Muhammadu Buhari pledging an education budget increment of 50% over the next two years and 100% by 2025, well over and above the 20% global benchmark, at the 2021 Global,” he said.