Educationist seeks for PPP support for out-of-school children

An educationist, Mr Orji Kanu, has called for public-private partnership (PPP), both internationally and locally, to eliminate the menace of out-of-school children in the country. Kanu made the call in an interview on Thursday in Lagos.

According to the expert, who is also the President of the Association for Formidable Educational Development (AFED), government cannot develop education alone, even in advanced nations.

He added that AFED is a private sector driven organisation with over 30,000 low cost schools across the nation under its umbrella.

"We have over 4.5 million children already obtaining one form of education or the other in our kind of schools and we intend to intensify our efforts," he said.

Kanu said that low cost schools were those that collect between 3,000 and 5,000 as fees termly, yet children were well educated.

"We've proven that we can survive. That's where we belong to and we're in the majority," he said.

He said some individual and corporate organisations, including the Buckingham University, had collaborated with AFED to train teachers in low cost schools.

"Over the years we've been doing the seminar method of training but we discovered it wasn't giving us the desired impact.

"Our teachers are now being trained by university professors from Buckingham online and we just concluded a training.

"We are doing it to ensure we give teachers the prerequisite skills they need to impact knowledge," he said.

Kanu further urged young graduates to contact AFED for trainings in order receive capacity to establish their own schools for out-of-school children, which will also make them self-employed.