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SBMC’s role critical towards reducing number of out-of-school children

Published

6 years ago

September 12, 2019

By Funmi Lawrence

The School-Based Management Committee (SBMC) is a peculiar idea introduced to bring communities, parents, non-parents, teachers, artisans, school children and governments under one umbrella for synergy for the purpose of addressing challenges in the basic education sector.

These challenges range from funding, infrastructure and service delivery as members of the committee would no longer have to wait for government interventions. By this, what it means is that communities would automatically become stakeholders while actively participating in the management of public schools in their environments in partnership with the government for judicious and timely cogent actions.

UNICEF since May 2012, has been implementing the eight-year GEP3/EAC (2012-2020) blueprint funded by the UK Department for International Development, DFID, which aims at contributing to improved social and economic opportunity for girls in northern Nigeria.

The sole aim of the Girls Education Project Phase-3/Educate-A-Child is to get school-age girls to schools without neglecting boys’ enrolment.

Before now, the GEP3 was being implemented in five Northern states, namely: Bauchi, Katsina, Niger, Sokoto, Zamfara states, and now Kano makes it the sixth state the project is being implemented.

In Kano state is an 11-years-old Lamiratu Ibrahim who has taken pleasure in not only coming to school but also learning skills for the betterment of her life.

The primary four pupil of Ja’en Special Primary School, Gwale Local Government Area of Kano State has now found a new reason not to jettison her pursuit of education for the ‘army’ of out-of-school children that frolics the streets on daily basis.

Ibrahim attributed her newfound love for the primary school to the provision of borehole facilities, construction of a Girl Child Vocational Centre in the school and many more new skills in the school which were provided by the SBMC.

The vocational center in the school is being spearheaded by Mothers Association to provide skills acquisition programme for the girls which has contributed immensely to reducing girls hawking and begging in the streets.

Vocational skills like sewing, beads-making, soap making, and others, resultantly, have been incorporated into the school curriculum to equip pupils for productivity.

At a Two-Day Media Dialogue in Kano, pundits have welcomed the SBMC concept saying that it is facilitating the entrance of pupils into schools thereby reducing the number of out-of-school children in the country.

The DFID-facilitated media dialogue on SBMC in Kano which took us to Ja’en Special Primary School saw the Head Teacher of the school, Mr. Abba Mohammed who said since the involvement of SBMC in the school since 2017, the school has generated about N1,249,000 which was used in providing facilities.

“Kano, which has over 4,500 primary schools on the SBMC scheme, has continued to witness the positive impact of the community intervention in education.

“We have been able to provide developmental projects to include farmland for the school, provision of learning materials for pupils, renovation of classrooms, provision of mechanized borehole and likes.

“At the inception of the school in 1974, we had only 42 pupils but gradually things keep going on but there was a drastic output in the sense that from 2017 when SBMC was introduced to the school, our population has increased to 4170.

“There is a male population of 2,057 and a female population of 2,133 which shows that there was more enrolment of the girl child as the people of Kano state are now better informed of the need to educate the girl child,” he said.

It is worth noting that SBMC roles also range from monitoring teaching and learning activities in schools to ensuring security in the school as well as providing feedback to community members towards supporting the school’s needs.

Mr. Tijjani Baraya, Kano State SBMC Chairman, said the scheme set up to ensure community ownership of education has successfully acted as a bridge between schools and communities, thereby recording several success stories.

“The concept behind SBMC is to give the community the chance to support schools within their environment and SBMC’s is accredited to be a link between the community, school authority and the government.

“First of all, I will say SBMC has achieved in Kano the ownership of the schools within that environment that is a great achievement.

“Before nobody cares about public schools within the community, once you see a school within your community you feel that is government property but today they have realized that the schools within their community belong to them not the government, so this is a great achievement made by the SBMC.

“Now, if there are some dilapidation in the structures, community use to come together and renovate the structure so that the children can have space to learn.

“There are a lot of campaigns by SBMC’s for all-purpose and other communities, philanthropists and stakeholders within the community to realize that the government alone cannot do it so there is the need for each and every one of us to support the schools within the community we are living.”

On the provision of facilities to assist learning outcomes if campaigns were made by SBMC to bring back to school children who are not in school, he said the need of the children would be catered for.

“The concept is for the communities to take ownership of that school because as I say government alone cannot do it because of look at the population; in Kano, we have almost 4,000 primary public schools in Kano alone.

“Now the population of the pupils in school is about two million, so if the communities will not support the school I don’t think the government alone can do it.”

Meanwhile, the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) says the Girls Education Project in six participating states will bring an additional one million girls to school by 2020.

Mr. Richard Akanet, Kano State UNICEF Coordinator of the project said that the SBMC was a national strategy that was employed to get school-age girls to school without neglecting the boys’ enrolment.

Akanet said that the SBMC had been able to incorporate a huge number of Quranic schools into formal education.

He said each school has one SBMC which focus on the need of the school improvement, planning as well as improving enrolment and reducing out of school children.

According to him, the target of the project is to ensure more girls in the targeted states in Northern Nigeria complete basic education, while also acquiring skills for life and livelihood.

Akanet also explained that the GEP 3 SBMC initiative had created 1,539 female teachers in Kano State to ease learning outcomes.

He also said that by 2020, 1.6 million girls would be reached by improved teaching and a girls-friendly learning environment.

The UNICEF coordinator said that by the target year, 42,000 primary and Quranic school teachers would have also been trained and mentored in child center pedagogy.

Also, Alhaji Bello Kagara, Director, Social Mobilisation, Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) says to develop schools especially in the rural communities, there was the need for government engagements with School-Based Management Committee (SBMC).

Kagara said the responsibility of the SBMCS was to ensure that resources are mobilized in the form of funds, labor, time and expertise towards supporting school implementation programs.

He said the issue of out-of-school children was becoming worrisome hence the need to involve SBMCS who would conduct sensitization and advocacy to change the orientation of parents and guardians on the need to get their children in school.

“To us, school development agents should be engaged. We are engaging them in several areas. One of such areas is to ensure the provision of adequate access to those children within their community.

“In that regard, the issue of out-of-school children is one of them. They are to mobile parents to link up with all categories of opinion leaders and stakeholders in the education sector in our country.

“If they do that, then be rest assured that out-of-school children will be a thing of history in the country. ”

Kagara expressed worry over the concern of the political will of some state governors towards schools as well as towards taking care of some education affairs of the states.

He added that with the level of advocacy and sensitization that is being conducted; there had been changes in the level of compliance by some state governors.

He said that will the involvement of SBMC, the community are at advantage of monitoring VB the supervision of the project.

“We have developed a manual detailing how SBMC should be engaged in school development.

“At our level, we release 75 percent directly to the school-based community to take school development initiatives. We give 75 percent first tranche payment and we monitor the school to ascertain the level of utilization of the fund.

“We put in place quality to get the utilization of the money and project and also to mentor the School and engage the school to engage SBMC to deliver the project.”

He added that N2.78 billion had been invested by the Kano state government in school-based management intervention of 2,505 schools in the state.

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Business

Tax Reform Bills: The Verdict of Nigerians

Published

2 weeks ago

March 6, 2025

The Gleamer

Ismaila Ahmad Abdullahi Ph.D

The public hearings conducted recently by the two Chambers of the National Assembly have elicited positive responses from a broad spectrum of Nigerians, cutting across regional interest groups, government agencies, civil society groups, concerned individuals, the academia, and Labour Unions, among diverse others. Contrary to a few dissensions hitherto expressed in the media, almost all the stakeholders who spoke during the week-long sessions were unanimous in their declaration that the hallowed Chambers should pass the tax reform bills after a clean-up of the grey areas.

The public hearings were auspicious for all Nigerians desirous of economic growth and fiscal responsibility. They were also a watershed moment for the Federal Inland Revenue Service, which had been upbeat about the tax reforms. Indeed, the public hearings had rekindled hope in the tenets of democracy that guarantee freedom of expression and equitable space for cross-fertilisation of ideas. Without gainsaying the fact, the tax reform bills have been unarguably about the most thought-provoking issues in Nigeria today, drawing variegated perspectives and commentaries from even unlikely quarters such as the faith-based leaders, student bodies, and trade unions, which speaks much about the importance of the bills.

In the build-up to the public hearings, not many people believed that the bills would make it to the second reading, much less the public hearings. Even the Northern stakeholders who seemed unlikely to support the passage of the bills have softened their stance and have given valuable suggestions that would enrich the substance of the bills. The Arewa Consultative Forum came to the public hearings well-prepared with a printed booklet that addressed their concerns. It concluded with an advisory that the bills should be “Well planned, properly communicated, strategically implemented and ample dialogue and political consensus allowed for the reforms to be accepted.”

The concerns of ACF ranged from the composition of the proposed Nigeria Revenue Service Board as contained in Part 111, Section 7 of the bill, the unlimited Presidential power to exempt/wave tax payment as proposed in Section 75(1) of the bill, the family income or inheritance tax as contained in Part 1, Section 4(3) of the bill, to the issues around development levy and VAT. On the development levy, the ACF stated that unless the Federal Government is considering budgetary funding for TETFUND, NASENI and NITDA, it does not see the “wisdom behind the plan to replace (them) with NELFUND”.

The position of the North was equally reinforced by the Supreme Council for Shariah in Nigeria, Northern Elders Forum, Kano State Government, Professor Auwalu Yadudu, and the FCT Imams. Like the ACF, these stakeholders lent their respective voices to the Section on the Inheritance Tax in Part 1 of the bill and the use of the term ‘ecclesiastical’, which, in their views, undermines certain religious rights and beliefs. The Kano State Government, represented by Mahmud Sagagi, affirmed that “we support tax modernisation” but cautioned that “we must ensure that this process does not come at the expense of states’ constitutional rights and economic stability”. Professor Auwalu Yadudu, a constitutional law professor, drew attention to the use of the ‘supremacy clause’ and cautioned that the repeated use of “notwithstanding” in the bills would undermine the supremacy of the Nigerian constitution if passed as such.

Other stakeholders that made contributions at the sessions included the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas, Fiscal Responsibility Commission, Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria, Nigeria Customs Service, and a host of others. While most of their concerns bordered on technical issues requiring fine-tuning, they were unanimous in their support for the bills. They aligned with the position of the Executive Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service, Zacch Adedeji, Ph.D. and the Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, Mr Taiwo Oyedele, which is that the extant tax laws and fiscal regulations are obsolete necessitating reforms aimed at creating a fair and equitable tax and fiscal space to grow Nigeria’s economy.

In one of the sessions, Dr Zaach Adedeji expounded on the criss-cross of trade activities in the Free Trade Zone whereby companies misuse tax waivers as exporters to sell their goods or services in the Customs Area at an amount usually less than the price the operators in the Customs Area who pay VAT and other taxes sell theirs thereby disrupting business transactions. This way, the operators in the Free Trade Zone shortchange the government in paying their due taxes by circumventing extant regulations, which are inimical to the economy’s growth.

Overall, the presentations were forthright, foresighted, and helpful in elucidating the issues contained in the bills. According to the statistics read out at the end of the hearings at the Senate, 75 stakeholders were invited, 65 made submissions, and 61 made presentations. At the House of Representatives 53 stakeholders made presentations. By all means, this is a fair representation. Given the presentations, it is evident that the National Assembly has gathered enough materials to guide its deliberations on the bills. As we look forward to the passage of the bills, we commend the leadership of the National Assembly for their unwavering commitment to making the bills see the light of the day.

Abdullahi is the Director of the Communications and Liaison Department, FIRS.

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