Authors: Adamu, M. R., Okam, C. C.
Journal Article | Publish Date: 01/January/2024
Discrimination against women’s education in relationship to the bid for enhancing their human resources development has been the subject of concern for several years in the world. Four world conferences were held in Mexico (1975), Nairobi (1985), Copenhagen (1995) and Beijing were designed, among other aims and objectives, to improve and enhance the human resource development indices of women. In the perspective of this exposition, these conferences largely dealt with the way and means of executing, in practical terms, most of the pronouncements and recommendations demonstrated above in the Dakar Framework for Action (2000) for the human resource development of women. The United Nations (UN) also organized very high frequency commissions on women and approved a decade for women from 1985 to 1995. These commissions “endorsed, recognized and emphasized the need to promote the education of girls and women and to bring about necessary conditions for them to enjoy full and genuine equality in education especially at the secondary and higher levels and in science and technology education” (Okeke, 1999). Also, these conferences advanced the need to enhance the status of the girl-child and women and help them to participate fully in the various responsibilities of economic, social and political life for rapid and qualitative development of the country. In line with these reflections, the National Policy on Education (NPE, 2004) clearly states that every Nigerian shall have a right to equal educational opportunities according to his or her ability. We need to employ education for the purpose of exploring gender issues and matters to enhance and improve the psyche of our womenfolk. We also need to explore all necessary and a variety of pedagogical processes and avenues in order to expose our womenfolk in curriculum resource development so as to enable them contribute their own quota in addressing and solving such national development problems as the “over-population crises” in which Nigeria is currently wallowing. Through exposures to education, our womenfolk could be made to occupy central and strategic positions in our socio-economic framework such that they could also put checks and restrictions in our population growth. It is vital that all women be exposed meaningfully to formal and non-formal forms of education programmes in order to tap into the knowledge-resources base of human development as a curriculum design. Through this emphasis, these women could become human resources – assets and experts on issue and matters which bear on sustainable national development in the context of Nigeria
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