Nigeria: Education Secretariat Flags Off School Mapping Project

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Leadership (Abuja)

8 August 2008
Posted to the web 8 August 2008

FCT Secretary for Education, Alhaji Hussaini Halilu Pai, has stated that the policy objective of the FCT education secretariat is to provide unfettered access to quality and relevant educational services to citizens of the territory.

Pai, who was represented by the Executive Chairman, FCT Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Alhaji Musa Maikasuwa Yakubu, stated this during the occasion of the flagging off ceremony of FCT national school mapping project.

He stated: "School mapping is the art and science of building geospatial data bases of educational, demographic, social and economic information for schools and educational directorates to support educational planning and decision making".

The school mapping activity, according to him, also entails collection of data that will exist side-by-side with the other Education Management information System (EMIS) data, as well as data from other sectors "and together they will enrich our decision making and planning processes to provide for our educational needs".

He added that the project is a process in which all schools and educational institutions would be computerised, from primary to tertiary, including the adult lieracy centres, which would be plotted on the FCT map. "This will eventually be pooled together with that of the 36 states to produce a map of Nigeria indicating the location of all schools on it, and by doing that, we are going to have all schools at our finger tips".

The secretary further added that FCT had always been proactive and thus always in the lead in applying current techniques in educational management in carrying out its mandate. He stressed that school mapping exercise was not really a new idea in the FCT as the FCT UBEB had already undertaken some degree of school mapping in respect of the basic education schools both in public and private schools.

In his words: "We are kick-starting another level of school mapping exercise that will take care of the entire sub-sector and this will also give us the opportunity of downloading the data into our collections posed from different agencies under the secretariat and other data institutions will be trained for the exercise and after the training, it will move to the field to get the coordinators of all our schools".

He advised that school mapping forms part of the decision and planning process, integrates the spatial distribution of education systems and provides the analytical tools that make it possible to identify and project in time and space the physical elements which contribute to the general educational planning effort.

He called on all Nigerians, individuals and corporate organisations, local and international agencies to support education in order to successfully achieve the FCT vision and mission, as well as the goals of the MDGs.

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