Group Wants Increased Budgetary Allocation For Education

Human Development Initiative (HDI), an NGO, has urged the Federal and state governments to increase budgetary allocation on education to 15 per cent to enhance the sector.
The Programme Manager, HDI, Mr Johnson Ibidapo, gave the advice on Wednesday during a sensitisation programme for basic education stakeholders in Ojo Local Government Area in Lagos.
That the NGO has conducted the sensitisation programme in nine communities within the state.
The programme manager said that basic education required adequate funding to lay proper education foundation for the pupils.
“The government needs to do more in terms of funding Universal Basic Education (UBE) in order to get more out of school children back to school.
“If these out of school children are not given the opportunity to go to school, they will become hoodlums and problem to the society.
“The Federal government must improve and increase the allocation on education to at least 15 per cent to improve the sector.
“At this juncture, I want to call on the state governments to stop relying on FG intervention for UBE fund.
“UBE fund has now become the major source of funding basic education in many states in Nigeria.
“This is wrong, because education is on the concurrent list, which means that both Federal and State can legislate on it differently.
“States should source for alternative way of funding to develop education in their states,” he said.
Ibidapo said the states should not rely on the little money coming from Federal Government, which was just two per cent of the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
He said the money was too small to fund basic education.
Ibidapo said that the objective of the programme was to ensure basic education tools and services get delivered to the school, “not just in the right quality, but also appropriate auditing of furniture delivered to schools.
“We also want to know how we can reduce out of school pupils in Nigeria. Before COVID-19, there were 13.3 million out of school children”.
“Now that children are at home due to the pandemic, we must find ways on how they will go back to school again”.