ABSTRACT
Nigeria, with a population of over 140 million, estimated to rise to 156 million by 2015, is Africa’s largest country by population. Towards the end of the first decade of the present century the public teaching force comprised around 680,000 primary and 120,000 junior/secondary teachers. The 2010 UNESCO monitoring report estimates that expenditure on teachers will have to increase by over 300 per cent if EFA targets are to be met by 2015. Currently Nigeria has 10 per cent of the global figure of out-of-school children at the primary level (UNESCO, 2010a). These are daunting figures. Nigeria also has a currently buoyant private sector, although reliable figures in respect of teachers, teacher qualifications and learner enrolment are difficult to establish. The prevalence of unapproved private schools further compounds the problem of lack of accurate statistics on this sector. The education system in Nigeria has been seriously undermined by huge and persistent data gaps, making informed planning and effective monitoring and evaluation immensely difficult. The last time Nigeria sent education data to UIS was in 2005. Data gathered after 2005 has been so riddled with errors, gaps and contradictions that it was impossible to forward it to UIS. This was particularly evident in the data concerning teachers. To address this challenge, the Federal Ministry of Education has recently developed and adopted a new policy on Education Management Information System (EMIS) that calls for a decentralised, systemic and professional approach to EMIS. However, problems still remain.
