From Africa Recovery, Vol.13#1 (June 1999), page 12 (box within article "Nigeria: Country in Focus")

Deterioration in education and health services

During its first decade of independence, Nigeria made considerable progress in education, but standards have since plummeted. Enrolment in primary schools grew from about 3.5 million in 1970 to 20.4 million in 1997, while attendance in tertiary institutions leapt from 15,600 to about 862,023. Though successive governments have accorded education high budgetary priority, funding increases have not kept pace with student expansion, resulting in a sharp decline in quality. Poor maintenance has worsened the problem, and many public education institutions lack basic facilities, including textbooks and libraries, and the size of classes is growing. Many schools are housed in dilapidated buildings, lacking water and electricity.

Only 57 per cent of adult Nigerians are literate, matching the rate for sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 71 per cent for all developing countries. The literacy level in Nigeria has changed little in the 1990s, though the number of women able to read and write rose from 23 per cent in 1980 to 47 per cent in 1995.

The challenge facing the authorities is not only to provide more and better educational facilities despite inadequate revenues, but also to persuade the poor to attend school in times of sluggish economic growth and high unemployment. In recent years, a growing number of children have dropped out to work to boost meagre family incomes or to survive on their own. Urban streets are full of children doing all sorts of odd jobs, from hawking food to working in sweat shops. According to UNICEF's The State of the World's Children 1999 report, the number of boys dropping out of school in four states in eastern Nigeria rose from 51 per cent in 1994 to 58 per cent in 1996.

Healthcare also suffers from inadequate funding. Over 1994-97, government health spending averaged just 4.5 per cent of the budget. Most public health institutions lack basic facilities such as medicines and dressings. Nigeria has done well in terms of providing doctors and nurses relative to the size of the population. Its population per physician ratio of roughly 3,780 is considerably better than the average for sub-Saharan Africa. But it could be a lot better still: then health minister Ikechukwu Madubuike estimated in 1995 that no less than 21,000 Nigerian doctors were practising in the US alone, roughly the same number that were working in Nigeria. The exodus has been stimulated, in part, by the low pay and ill-equipped facilities facing many health workers.

Despite critical shortages in its hospitals, Nigeria has sustained key primary health care initiatives, including childhood immunization, oral rehydration therapy and iodization of salt. Nevertheless, Nigeria still suffers from an array of preventable or curable killer diseases, including diarrhoea, respiratory infections and malaria, worsened by the fact that less than half the population has access to safe water. More recently, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has become a growing threat, with one estimate suggesting that 5 per cent of the population now carries the virus.

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