Congratulations to Zainab Bala and Bernadette Vivuya on winning the 2021 Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling!
The winning entries
Bala, a Nigerian broadcaster with Viewer Television, produced The Almajiri, a gripping documentary that focused on children in northern Nigeria who left their homes for Islamic education in the nation’s capital where they were neglected and abused by their religious teachers. In graphic footage, she showed how some children were restrained in chains and others were forced to beg...
Think back to when you were 10. Imagine if you had not been able to read and understand a simple story at that age. Where do you think you would be today?
Age 10 is the age at which children should be switching from learning to read to reading to learn. This critical milestone sets children up for a lifetime of learning. It increases their ability to earn, innovate, improve their own opportunities, and contribute to their societies, including becoming...
Ten-year-old Esther Okore, a primary six student of the Denon Free Tuition Education Foundation at Agbelekale, on the outskirts of Lagos, Nigeria, is a brilliant child who dreams of becoming a medical doctor. However, during the COVID-19 lockdown, her father lost his job, thus threatening not only whether or not Esther could stay in school, but also her four other siblings.
Esther dreams of becoming a doctor as a means of giving back to society, but today that is a...
Yesterday the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) released the latest preliminary data on global aid spending in 2020. It showed that last year, donors provided $161 billion in official development assistance (ODA). This represents a 3.5% increase, in real terms, compared to 2019. It is especially encouraging to see that in a year where there was a global pandemic and economic downturn and even advanced economies suffered, they still managed to prioritise and increase global aid.
More ambition required
However, this...
While the pandemic is hitting all global economies around the world, African countries have been hit especially badly. In the lead-up to the pandemic, there was a decline in official development assistance (ODA) and an increase in debt. And since the pandemic hit, there have been huge declines in remittances, foreign investment, and revenues.
The impact isn’t just economic, but it’s also on an individual level — access to vaccines, children not being able to go to school and learn,...
The World Bank estimates that COVID-19 could push between 143 and 163 million people into extreme poverty around the world in 2021, including nearly 50 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. And the pandemic could end up costing the global economy more than US$22 trillion by 2025 — roughly US$10 billion a day — compared to pre-pandemic projected growth.
To combat the pandemic, advanced economies have moved fast to pre-order vaccines and pump trillions of dollars to shore up national economies....
Diana Ayala is a Youth Leader for Global Partnership for Education. She raises awareness of the barriers to education and aims to increase the ambition of leaders for financing education and development.
More than a year after the first announcement of the COVID-19 pandemic by the WHO, the announcement of COVID-19 vaccines has brought hope that millions of lives can be saved and this virus that has taken the lives of more than 2 million people around the world can...
Ashlegh Pfunye and Iyunoluwa Ademola-Popoola are Youth Leaders for Global Partnership for Education. They raise awareness of the barriers to education and aim to increase the ambition of leaders for financing education and development.
It is undeniable that COVID-19 has altered how we live and work. Lives continue to be lost, and hospitals and health workers have been overwhelmed with patients suffering from the virus. Though efforts such as social distancing, wearing of masks, and bans on large gatherings have...
COVID-19 is not just a health crisis, but a massive economic crisis costing the global economy more than US$300 billion a month — roughly US$10 billion a day — over six years. Government finances have been hit hard due to strict lockdowns, and dramatic declines in global trade, commodity prices, and tourism. While every country is affected, not every country has equal means to respond. Many wealthy countries moved swiftly to keep their economies afloat through stimulus packages worth...
Maryjacob Okwuosa, Mukhtar H. Modibbo are Youth Leaders for Global Partnership for Education. They raise awareness of the barriers to education and aim to increase the ambition of leaders for financing education and development.
The impact of COVID in Nigeria
The advent of the COVID pandemic has not only revealed the poor state of infrastructure and facilities in the health sector of Nigeria but also revealed the reality of the dilapidation and poor funding of the education sector. Aside from the...