By Esho Ayemoba in Benin
The Executive Chairman, Edo State Universal Basic Education Board (Edo SUBEB), Mrs. Ozavize Salami, has justified Governor Godwin Obaseki’s aggressive drive in education reforms even as she said that the state has trained over 15, 400 teachers.
The teachers, she explained have also been upskilled in modern teaching and learning pedagogy.
The disclosure came to the fore while she was sharing insights on how the state government has transformed the basic education sector to tackle learning poverty at the Educational Summit which held at the Freetown International Conference Centre, in Sierra Leone.
Salami, averred that the Obaseki-led Administration remains committed to improving learning outcomes and is investing hugely to accelerate and sustain the gains recorded in the sector.
The reform, according to her also focused on the use of digital instructional materials. All the teachers use tablets and scripted lessons across every local government area in the state, including the hard-to-reach communities.
Speaking on Obaseki’s basic education sector reforms as spotlight at African education stakeholders’ conference according to statement signed by Mr. Crusoe Osagie, SA to the Governor in Sierra Leone, he added that the reforms by the Governor to transform Edo’s basic education sector and tackle learning poverty, has again, gotten global recognition.
This he added took the centre stage at the first-ever Foundational Learning Exchange (FLEX) Summit organized by African education stakeholders, explaining that the summit held at the Freetown International Conference Centre, in Sierra Leone, gathered ministers from across the region and other stakeholders from several African countries, including Cote d’Ivoire, the Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria and Rwanda, as well as over 80 foreign partners/donors.
According to him, Edo was the only sub-national invited as a state to the Africa education summit and continues to stand out as a sub-national that is demonstrating strong political will and action to accelerate foundational literacy and numeracy.
The SUBEB Chairman, pointed out: “The state is focused on elaborate monitoring and evaluation machinery for the programme because it was important for us to track individual pupils. So, for every child in our programme, we are able to track their performance and progress. We are able to look at areas that need improvements and feed them back into the ways the lessons are created. This is to ensure that we are able to check if the programme is on track so that we can measure our learning outcomes.”
According to her, 3 years after the programme, based on our evaluation, we saw that the average Edo child was closer to the international reading performance level of 110 words per minute, which is way higher than the Nigerian average.
“We are currently improving the programme, especially with a view to domesticating it.” She said.
