The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) has said that conflict has deprived 685,000 people of education in the Northeast. The alarm was raised in the UN’s 2021 first quarter Dashboard released Sunday to journalists in Maiduguri, the Borno state capital. It said: “The targeted people for basic education was 1.1 million, but only 342,000 were reached,” noting that even though $51.3 million (N19.5 billion) were required for the education in the region; only 1% coverage was recorded in the first quarter this year. On the reached people in Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps, the Dashboard disclosed: “About 2,000 IDPs were reached with education, comprising mainly children between the ages of three and 17,” lamenting that only 100 IDP returnees had education during the period under review. Continuing, it added that; “Over 340,000 children and adults accessed education in the host communities of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states. “The number of conflict affected out of school boys and girls accessing education through the learning centers reached only 828 pupils, while the target was 576,897 children in the first quarter of 2021.” The falling trend on accessing education was also recorded in the number of trained teachers to improve their teaching and learning approaches. According to the Dashboard, out of the targeted 19,998 teachers, only 3,892 teachers were reached for training with 19.5% coverage. It explained that only 204 school based management committee members were also trained out of the targeted 6,666 committee members. “There was a coverage of only 3.1% for the school based management committee (SBMC) training,” it lamented.
