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The following report by Demas Shinggu Project Officer was sent to me by Kelechi Micheals. Kelechi is the Programme Operations Manager at Fantsuam Foundation and is a core member of the UK-Nigeria Team who hold weekly online meetings. " Years of neglect have left Nigeria with poor quality public education. Many schools fail to provide even basic opportunities for learning. School buildings and facilities are inadequate. Teaching standards are low. Teachers receive inadequate training and have little motivation to improve. Management of education is weak and often ineffective, inefficient and top heavy. There is a desire for reform, but policies...

I've decided to flip over from my "looking backwards on a regular basis experiment" to looking forwards instead. So what lies ahead this week? (And what about the two weeks back that I haven't covered yet?). I'm hoping it's going to be a "catch up with things and don't go out so often" week. I'll try to get to the regular School of Everything Unplugged on Wednesday after our usual online UK-Nigeria team meeting but exept for that I just want to get on with stuff. I have a mountain of new contacts to get back to, and I also...

This week at the UK-Nigeria meeting some of the benefits of a typed Skype meeting were demonstrated. Namely, that team members were able to join from different sites and Kelechi who had to urgently leave to assess the damage of a bush fire at Attachab was able to read the archive and join the meeting later. John informed us that 6 key staff were away from Fantsuam Foundation on training this week. We were pleased that one of the staff was able to join us from Kaduna where she was attending EU Inside training. It was this staff member who...

Training was once again a top topic at this week’s UK-Nigeria meeting. It is in fact an intrinsic part of Fantsuam Foundation - be it computer training at the Academy or health education or teaching staff to take blood samples from 5,000 children to screen for Sickle Cell Disease. It seems that once again FF has excelled in this area. Towards the end of 2010 I reported that John was hoping to set up Community Health Committees, and in December we were delighted to report that three communities had signed up to the concept. It was therefore very exciting to...

The subject of training was again at the heart of discussions during the wide-ranging UK-Nigeria team meeting which took place this week. Comfort told us that the Fantsuam staff and their partners had received Nutritional training from one of their International volunteers. This highlighted the fact that although the local environment does in fact have all the food groups one needs for a healthy diet, it is important to educate the community about which food sources provide good cheap sources of protein, vitamins, carbohydrates etc. And to inform them what portions of the various food groups are required for a...