The Universal Basic Education Commission has revealed that Nigeria needs an additional 20,000 schools and 907,769 classrooms to be able to absorb the growing number of out-of-school children in the country.
A statement by the Director, Press, of the Federal Ministry of Education, Ben Goong, disclosed this on Tuesday.
The statement noted that the Executive Secretary of UBEC, Hammed Boboyi, gave the statistics while briefing the Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, on his agency’s activities.
The PUNCH reports that there have been controversies over the true state of out-of-school children in Nigeria. Though the official number of out-of-school children in Nigeria as of September 2023 could not be independently verified by our correspondent at the time of filing this report due to a delay in the conduct of the national census, a 2022 report by UNESCO estimated that Nigeria currently has approximately 20 million out-of-school children.
But the Nigerian…