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[Nigeria]Nigerian glossary

Moving to Kaduna

Written by kevin

Some big news for you (although some people know already), I’m leaving Abuja! I’ll be staying in Nigeria, moving up to Kaduna, which is about two hours north of Abuja by car.

Although Radio Nigeria has been a nice place to work and they have treated me well there just hasn’t been enough work to keep me busy (or even close to busy). Projects are endlessly delayed due to internal bureacracy and funding problems and a few people within the hierarchy are happy to just sit at their desk and do nothing all day, having no interest in improving things at the radio station. As an example, a few months after I started we requested for six computers so that we could start training newsroom staff in how to use computers. Those computers have only just arrived, over six months later.

The problems have been discussed between myself and Radio Nigeria and then with VSO, every time there was much optimism that things would get going soon but no action. Finally my programme manager at VSO and I decided that my placement was unlikely to achieve anything and that my second year would be better spent elsewhere.

My new placement is with NTI, the National Teachers’ Institute. They exist to provide teacher training using distance learning methods and are an important part of the Universal Basic Education programme that is starting up in Nigeria. At present there are teachers who are completely unqualified and many who qualified by studying teaching at high school. The government wants them to upgrade their qualifications but there are not enough teachers to allow them to go away to college for months, instead they will stay wheere they are and NTI will provide the training there.

I will be the head of ICT at NTI, they are in the process of creating an ICT department to bring together all the work they are doing with computers and communications.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 09:05 and is filed under VSO.

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