The 20th Nigerian Economic Summit has opened and participants are in high spirit, as they seek to address issues in Nigeria’s education sector.
The summit, holding from March 18 to 20 at the Trasncorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, has as its theme; “Transforming Education Through Partnerships for Global Competitiveness”.
The Director General, Nigerian Economic Summit Group, Mr Frank Nweke, said that the decision to hold the Summit on education was taken to redress the decline in the sector seen as a critical factor in economic development.
Mr Nweke said: “The education sector is in dire straits and requires the intervention of both public and private stakeholders if it is to fulfill its function of preparing Nigeria to compete in the global economy”.
He pointed out that for the development of the Nigerian economy to be sustained, the education sector should be vibrant and able to produce skilled workforce.
Within the period of the summit, participants will consider four critical areas of the education sector – the needed national consensus on the objective of Nigeria’s education system, needed collective realisation of the pervasive centrality and importance of education to national development, sustainable structural reforms and changes needed in the education sector that will allow emergence of a 21st century economy and how to build a culture of life-long learning that is critical to ensuring that the Nigerian economy can respond quickly to global changes and global developments.
There will be a Presidential strategy session expected to be led by President Goodluck Jonathan, aimed at distilling what is required to ensure that the Nigerian education sector can deliver highly skilled, globally competitive individuals for the Nigerian economy.
The Chair, Technical Sub-committee Nigeria Economic Summit Group, Alero Ayida-Otobo, said that participants would also consider ways of making the teaching profession attractive and look at ways of removing the disparity existing between graduates of the university and those of the polytechnic, a gap that the Federal Government had tried to bridge in the past without a positive outcome.
The Supervising Minister of Education, Mr Nyesom Wike, expressed optimism that the conference would be exciting and proffer solutions to the challenges facing the education sector.
Expectations are high that the summit would help to recommend needed strategies that will reform the education sector in Nigeria.
