What Africa should focus on post-COVID-19 – TRCN Registrar

Opeyemi Adelere

The Registrar of Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN), Prof. Segun Ajiboye, has said that Africa must develop infrastructure to integrate technology into learning going forward to combat the challenges posed to the education sector by the COVID-19 experience.

The Registrar said the stay-at-home directive of the government, following the spread of the pandemic COVID-19, had affected the education of more than 1.5 million children and youths globally.

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According to him, the education sector was one of the worst hit in Nigeria and Africa as a whole due to lack of preparations on possible ways of sustaining learning activities when the pandemic spread to the continent.

He said, “In Nigeria and indeed Africa, we are badly affected because we were never prepared for this; we don’t have the infrastructure to be able to take care of this kind of situation.

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“In some other climes, they were able to mitigate the impact of the pandemic using technology mediated learning.

“Before the children were sent home, they were given laptops and the teachers have internet facilities and other applications they can use to teach their students during lockdown.

“According to reports, it is only one third of Africans that have access to the internet and that poses a big challenge.

“Even in Nigeria, just about 121 million Nigerians out of over 200 million have access that is about 61 per cent actually have access to the internet.”

Ajiboye identified lack of access as a major constraint to technology – driven learning in rural communities, and however commended the efforts of the Federal Ministry of Education and state governments to aid continuous learning through the use of television and radio. He further urged stakeholders to come together after the pandemic to revamp Nigeria’s education system so as to make it technologically driven.

“It is now very clear that 21st century education is not going to be one where teachers stand in front of the students to teach all the time. It is going to be a situation of what we call ‘Technology Mediated Learning’ and this is the way to go.

“I believe very strongly that this current situation is an eye opener for us and immediately after the pandemic, we will sit down as a country and chart a new course for our education system. In the areas of teachers’ preparation programmes in the universities and colleges of education, there must be provision of facilities as well as training and retraining of our teachers,” he said.

Speaking on developments in the teachers registration programmes, Ajiboye said there would be an upscale in programmes and more teachers would be involved.

“We will make sure that primary, basic and post basic teachers are involved and captured in the training programmes. Teachers will also be given laptops, they may have to pay for it in installments  and it will be subsidised to make it accessible to all.

“We are going to expand the scope of our Digital Literacy Programme and include more teachers as well as provide them with technological devices that will aid teaching and learning,” he said.