Project Hezi

In Nigeria, empty desks with no resources is a regular occurrence, with many schools not fortunate enough to have someone donating supplies. According to Unicef, Nigeria’s exponential growth in population has put immense pressure on the country’s resources and on already overstretched public services and infrastructure over the last decade. With children under 15 years of age accounting for about 45 per cent of the country’s population, the burden on education and other sectors has become overwhelming. Many families cannot afford the associated costs of sending their children to school such as uniforms and textbooks.[i] The issue of funding by the government and other relevant authorities has been a major challenge to mathematics education. The budgetary allocation to the education sector has been grossly inadequate as compared to funding from both developed and some developing countries.[ii] The population growth paired with inability to afford essential materials for school have led to 26% of children aged 12-17 to be out of education. In the poorest quantile, that figure is 65%. Many of the children in the poorest quantile are attending public schools. These tend to be crowded: “it is not rare to see cases of 100 pupils per teacher” and the schools lack adequate equipment to give to the pupils, an example being textbooks. The textbook: pupil ratio ranges from 1:10 to 1:100 across the country. Solution: We plan to donate relevant mathematics textbooks to 2,000 JSS1 – JSS3 students across 5 schools in areas where pupils in the poorest quantile live in Ibadan, Oyo State. With the help of the State Ministry of Education, we will select schools most in need of resources and provide enough textbooks for each Junior Secondary School student.