The Rivers State Ministry of Education, has called on
education planners and policy makers in the country to design education
programmes and curricula according to the needs and educational development
levels of the states and communities.

The Commissioner for Education, Dame Alice Lawrence – Nemi,
made the call at the opening ceremony of a 3-day sensitisation workshop titled:
“Strengthening Rivers State Education Sector for Strategic Investment Case”,
organised by the Ministry of Education in collaboration with United Nations
Children Fund (UNICEF) in Port Harcourt.

Represented by the Permanent Secretary, Dr. Richard Ofuru,
Dame Alice Lawrence-Nemi, emphasised that
education planners should consider the disparity in educational
development levels of the states while packaging the programmes for their
children, urging them to consider the socio-cultural, political, economic and
geographic backgrounds of the children during their educational decision-making
processes.

The Commissioner commended UNICEF, for its effort at
ensuring that the nation’s education planners and decision-makers got the
technical expertise and tools for designing the children’s education
development programmes in the country, urging the participants to take the
workshop serious in order to achieve set objectives.

Also speaking, the UNICEF resource person, Dr. Agatha
Nzeribe, disclosed that the organisation’s business is to provide the education
planners and policy makers with the expertise and tools to make decisions on
the educational development of the children, adding that the states which had
worked with UNICEF had always expressed gratitude for the inputs the body makes
in their children’s educational development.

“Whichever state that ever worked with us had always come
back to tell us that they value our input”, she expressed.

Dr. Nzeribe assured that the resource persons at the
workshop would look at some critical issues on children’s educational
development, noting that all the school children of Rivers State needed to “be
prepared for the emerging world”.

She urged education planners to do “bottleneck analysis” to
discover the reason for disparity in the educational development levels of the
children in the states and communities.

The UNICEF resource person emphasised the need for ensuring
that all children of the state gained access to the model schools and their
modern facilities which should be maintained at minimal cost, stating that one
of the benefits the participants would gain from the organisation was how to
arrive at the minimal maintenance cost of the facilities.

Eunice Choko-Kayode