Jason Njoku, a Nigerian-born UK-based businessman, has stated that for Nigeria to make progress, there must be a dramatic improvement in the country’s educational sector.
Njoku, the CEO/Co-Founder of iROKOtv, a company sometimes referred to as the “Netflix of Africa,” made the declaration while reacting to data on the low illiteracy in Nigeria.
The data resulted from a survey by the Centre for Global Development in the year 2022 and published by The Economist.
The survey was tagged ‘The long-run decline of education quality in the developing world.”
The researchers used comparable, survey-based literacy tests for repeated cross-sections of men and women born between 1950 and 2000 to study education outcomes across cohorts in 87 countries.
They found that education quality, defined as literacy conditional on completing five years of schooling, stagnated or declined across the developing world over half a century, with pronounced drops in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, especially Nigeria.
Nigeria was the lowest in the ‘female literacy rate after years of schooling’ category.
“Women aged 20-49 were unable to read a full sentence,” the report noted.
Njoku, who describes himself as a modern-day capitalist, noted that:
“Without a dramatic improvement in education, nothing changes in Nigeria or Africa in our lifetime. You simply can’t build a modern state without an educated, productive population.
“We’ve wasted 50 years and are still grappling with the basics. God is tired. It’s up to us.”
