Oladotun Fadeyiyie
CODE has released current updates on Education Budget Tracker. These updates were delivered yesterday 15th December, 2015 at the media practitioners and bloggers Roundtable at CODE Secretariat in Abuja. The aim of the roundtable was to share progression Education Intervention using the Education Budget Tracker for monitoring service delivery with support from The Indigo Trust and the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) under the OpenSocietic program.
Oludotun Babayemi, a monitoring and Evaluation Expert, CODE said despite the falling standard of education in the country, there are still significant numbers of Nigerians youths that are being denied access to quality education. He stated that, CODE kicked off the Education Budget Tracker in Zamfara state in 2013 after it was discovered that funds that were earmarked for education were misappropriated. “Our plan is to develop a platform for Education Budget Tracking for the 36 states in Nigeria, because it is the fundamental human right of every child to be educated (at least to be able to read and write)” and as such that right must not be denied by either state or federal government, that is why we have taken it upon ourselves as a non-profit organisation with support from Indigo Trust to ensure transparency and accountability in Education sector. We would like to see the funds allocated to Education Sector being channelled appropriately for speedy improvement in Education sector in the country, he affirmed.
Hamzat Lawal, CODE/Follow the Money, Team Lead said follow the money is out to bridge the gap between the policy makers and the people at the grassroot/local communities. He stated, at the beginning of our research in Zamfara we realised that were local communities in that state that are overlooked in term of adequate provision of basic infrastructure such as quality education, standard healthcare delivery and environmental sustainability support programmes.
He added further that our main focus for this Education Budget Tracking is to build an interactive platform where both the people at the local communities and policy makers can interface on the pressing issues around education in the country. This way, people at the grassroot would be able to air their views as well as demand for their basic rights.
Oludotun alluded that CODE, as part of Education Intervention Scheme, has in the last couple of months ensured that teachers and civil servants in Zamfara State has been subject to series of trainings and workshop in Data Scrapping, visualisation and analysis. This is to help enhance their capacities in their various field professions for improved service delivery.