By Rosemary Ogbonnaya
Government of Nigeria, United Nations for Children’s Fund,UNICEF, and partners have launched the Nigeria Learning Passport, NLP, an online, mobile and soon-to-be offline learning platform that will provide continuous education to 3 million learners in 2022 alone, and a total of 12 million by 2025.
It is a digital technologies harnessed to transform the ways children learn, including in remote locations and in emergencies.
Speaking at the launch the Vice President of Nigeria, prof. Yemi Osinbajo said, “To ensure continuity of learning for all children and the resilience of education systems to future shocks, we must change and reimagine the education sector,” said Nigerian Vice-President Professor Yemi Osinbajo, represented by Adamu Adamu, Minister of Education.
“Deploying innovations that rethink the current methodologies, including new approaches to delivering education in ways that defy the digital divide, and ensuring learning continuity in emergencies, has become imperative.”
Newsdiaryonline learnt that the Nigerian Learning Passport is designed for pre-primary, primary and secondary school learning. Children, youth, and teachers can access a digitalized curriculum providing learning materials in all core curriculum subjects for Primary One to Six, and all Junior and Senior Secondary School classes.
A learner can register on the platform using any device with a web browser, or through the NLP mobile application, to access a variety of high-quality learning content.
With the launch, Nigeria has joined 20 other countries in the world.
“Before COVID-19, about 10.5 million Nigerian children aged between 5 and 14 were not in school. Today in Nigeria, more than 9.7 million children are at risk of never returning to school, their learning left behind. The Learning Passport can help change that,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s Executive Director, in a goodwill message at the launch in Abuja, Nigeria.
“By offering simple, easy, and fun ways to learn, as well as tailor-made training programmes, the Learning Passport will help respond to the needs of every child. With online, offline, and mobile options, it can help us reach the most vulnerable and marginalized learners,” said Catherine Russell.
Nigeria’s education sector faces many challenges that have contributed to keeping more than 10.5 million children out of school in Africa’s most populous nation.
