We teach adults by radio – Mass Education boss

What are the activities of your agency?Well, first of all, the agency was established in 1991 after the enactment of the decree in 1990. The vision is to have a federal capital territory that is free of illiterate rural people through the provision of non-formal education that will eradicate illiteracy and empower the people for […]

What are the activities of your agency?
Well, first of all, the agency was established in 1991 after the enactment of the decree in 1990. The vision is to have a federal capital territory that is free of illiterate rural people through the provision of non-formal education that will eradicate illiteracy and empower the people for meaningful living. Our mission is to reach out to illiterate women, nomads, youths and girl child, as well as the disadvantaged group through collaboration with stakeholders with a view to making them functional members of the society.
When I came on board in March 2012, I started with coordinating the activities of adult learners. The agency is responsible for taking care of the education of adults that were not opportuned to be educated in their early life; it is like providing them with a second chance in life. We try to provide them with ability to learn reading and writing at the same time combining that with teaching them skills that will make them self reliant either as engineers, bricklayers, caterers etc.
We have youths and even young girls that dropped out of school, these are things that we do. We have 550 offices spread in the six geo-political zones of the FCT. You can fit into any of our programmes, and you are free to visit our zonal coordinators who will help you. We also have area officers assisting the zonal coordinators, and under them we have supervisors. And we have designated centres with facilitators that will go and teach them there. The teachers are the facilitators, the adults will dictate to teachers when to come and teach; they determine the time because they are adults.
We also have Literacy by Radio, where we have collaboration with Aso Radio, a programmer will be there, to read from a script, they teach the learners, we buy transistor radios and give them. Some area councils collaborate with us, they also buy radio for their people.
We also have vocational skills acquisition; they take care of making individuals to be self-reliant. We also have women programmes, technical programmes, and also agricultural programmes like fish farming.
 
Do you charge fees for these?
No, it is free. It is only the vocational aspect that maybe you need material for the practical; otherwise like poultry farming nothing is charged. We also run basic education that is why we need assistance from the Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC.
 
How have your programmes been accepted by the general populace?
Our basic problem is enlightenment. There was a time the agency went to a radio programme in Abuja and just announced our programmes and within just three hours we received more than 300 calls from listeners who wanted to know more and that increased the number of enrollees that we have.
If you listen to some enrolees; one woman said her husband one day gave her an ATM card when she requested for money, her neighbour told her she had to go to a bank so she went and sat in a bank for hours. The workers asked her what the problem was and she showed them the ATM card. They asked her what the code number was but she didn’t know. Even after the husband wrote the number she couldn’t read, it was at this point that she decided she had to learn how to read and write.
There are many instances; in Gwagwalada there was a man who went abroad and entered a women’s toilet, they embarrassed him not knowing he could not read. When he returned home he came to us and said he wanted to learn. There are thousands like that.
 
How many enrolees do you have presently?
The number fluctuates as they graduate, but we have about 8,500 within the FCT. The supervisors we have about 750 including part time facilitators who we pay N10,000 thanks to the FCT Minister because some states pay less than that.
 
How much does the agency require to properly function?
Honestly, we lack proper funding, this is the hub of skills acquisition, we even have graduates who after their graduation come to us because they want to obtain the necessary skills, and our challenge is that people don’t know we are here. The UBE intervention fund which comes every month, part of it is supposed to come to non-formal education but they don’t give. Sincerely, if we can have say N2 billion annually for both capital and recurrent expenditure, because FCT is growing every day, people are finding relative peace in Abuja so everyone wants to live here so the facilities are stretched, so we hope people will come to our aid.
What about international donor agencies?
UNICEF is assisting in training our facilitators and UNESCO as well will want to train only girls and women – they call it Procter& Gamble. They want women and girls to be trained through ICT using laptops and iPads etc. to teach.
 
What call do you have for residents?
We want everyone to come because when you have literacy you have peace. There is restiveness as a result of illiteracy, when you are enlightened you know this is not good for you. We are ready, we know there is influx of people in Abuja but we will try to accommodate them to make them educated and self-reliant. We also call on the traditional rulers to educate their subjects on the need for learning.