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Fourth, strong political will is required to address the income gap and promote distributive
justice in education. Although various interventions such as conditional cash transfer are
directed at closing some economic-induced gaps, such strategies require strong political will to
implement effectively and prevent fund diversion. Different tiers of the government need to be
encouraged to seriously commit themselves to ensuring effective pursuit of both equity and
quality issues in education across Nigeria and making adequate budgetary allocations to it.
While IDP led projects appear to be contributing to close some gaps, the may not be sustainable
at the expiration of the donor funding timeline. The government needs to expand its strategies
and engagement with non-state actors and corporate bodies to raise regular fund for the basic
education sector. Possibly a special arrangement may need to be made for regular donations,
channeling of corporate social responsibilities and other support into the special basic education
fund by the private sector besides the current tax fund which only 2% are allocated to the basic
education sector by the Federal Government.
Fifth, civil society engagement need to advance beyond playing advisory roles and mobilizing
resources for local schools, there is need to provide an effective mechanism and build the civil
society capacity to track education resources. The CATI need to be resuscitated while and the
SBMCs needs to be made functional in each community to ensure civil society involvement in
monitoring and evaluation of input and outcomes in the education sector. International support
should particularly give attention on building capacity of the country on transparent resource
utilization to minimize waste. Besides the issue of funding, evidence shows that SBMC is not
operational in substantial percentage of schools across the country. Both the government and
its partners need to give targeted attention to spreading, strengthening and sustaining the SBMC
to ensure civil society participation in both financial and non-financial management of schools.
Sixth, the integration madrasah into formal education needs to be strengthened. Evidence points
to both political and traditional obstacles to integrated Qur’anic, Islamiyya, and Tsangaya
schools. On the political side, after the previous efforts by the previous political administration
in the country, subsequent administration appear to have given relatively limited attention to
the integration of formal and Qur’anic education. Various reports also suggest that the existing
integrated almajiri schools are either being put into different uses other than their original
purpose of establishment while some others are falling apart without adequate care by either
the federal or the state government. The OLS regression estimates of the determinants of CLSPM,
CNWPM and ORF shows that the quality of in IQTE centres appears better than that of the
government schoold system. The historical suspicion and rejection of the formal education in
many traditional societies, such as nomadic Fulani groups, need to be addressed by establishing
strong linkage between the providers of formal education, government, religious and traditional
institutions. Such cooperation is needed to raise awareness and local support for formal
education and promote acceptance and enrolment in the integrated schools.
Seventh, comprehensive census of children with disabilities and effective implementation of
special needs education policy are urgently needed. Children with disabilities are still relatively
invisible as regards access to quality basic education in Nigeria. Reliable nationwide data on
their numbers, nature of disabilities and what is currently being done remains scarce. This
hinders meaningful special needs education planning, investment and intervention. Information
from the literature suggests that inadequate attention is currently being given to issue of
disability in education and the special needs education lacks adequate funding, monitoring and
support.