The National Commission for Nomadic Education (NCNE) on Monday said it will conduct a census of nomadic school teachers across the country to provide reliable data for planning and implementation of nomadic education programmes.
The Executive Secretary of the commission, Prof. Bashir Usman, made this known in Zaria, at the opening of a training workshop for enumerators, supervisors and coordinators, on biometric data capture of nomadic school teachers.
Usman, who was represented by Mr Mohammed Dan’Iya, Director, Social Mobilisation and Women Development, explained that the training was organised to build the capacity of the enumerators, supervisors and coordinators on the project.
He explained that the project would be piloted in Kaiama and Baruten Federal Constituency of Kwara State, with funds under the 2019 Zonal Intervention Constituency projects.
According to him, the success of the pilot scheme will provide the impetus to scale up to the remaining LGAs in Kwara state and other states in the country.
“The intervention will help in addressing the challenge of reliable data base for nomadic school teachers in the country needed for proper planning and implementation of programmes.
“We will deploy latest technology such as the Geo-Referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development (GRID) in the project.
“Through the study, we will identify teacher capacity development gaps and training needs, and in our commitment to quality assurance, the gaps identified will form part of our plan for teacher capacity development.”
He said that the commission has over the years faced challenges arising from the dearth of teachers both in number and quality, adding that the few nomadic teachers were often transferred indiscriminately from nomadic schools to the conventional ones.
He added that the transfers were done after receiving specialised trainings on how to handle the peculiarities associated with the provision of basic education to the nomads.
“As part of strategies to curtail some of these challenges, the commission is devising ways and means of tracking teachers posted to nomadic schools after training, to address the negative practice of incessant transfers.
“This will equally help provide an aggregated data on the number of teachers, their locations, level of qualification by gender and track teacher professional development across all the local government areas.
“The retention and tracking of teachers in nomadic schools in view of their critical role in the teaching and learning outcomes is of great concern to the commission, particularly in ensuring quality as enshrined in the Ministerial Strategic Plan,” he said.
The executive secretary called on states and local governments in the country to accord due attention to recruitment, deployment and retention of teachers posted to nomadic schools.
Earlier, the commission’s Director, Special Duties, Mr Hassan Jibo, said that the objective of the training was to generate evidence based data on nomadic school teachers.
Jibo said that the data would capture teachers qualifications, gender, status of employment, years of service, and pupil-teacher ratio for informed planning.
“It was also organised to enable us identity, cluster and map nomadic schools and teachers in constituencies; identify teacher capacity gaps, training needs and track teacher professional development and indiscriminate transfers,” he said.
