ESSPIN LAMENTS LACK OF EDUCATION FOR BLIND IN JIGAWA

 
Dutse- Education Sector Support Programme in Nigeria, ESSPIN, has lamented the inability of  blind children in Jigawa State to obtain any form of education due to lack of such special schools in the area.

Head Facilitator of ESSPIN, Mr Bala Usman who made this known said, ''blind children do not go to school in this state because there are no such schools for them,'' even as those among them, who want to enrol into ''conventional schools can not do so because of poverty.''

Usman who spoke in an interview with Vanguard in Dutse, said that although he had no available statistics on the number of blind children in the state, they were large enough for the government to establish a school for them.

Said he, ''I do not want to give you a wrong figure because I do not have the exact statistics of the, but from the nine pilot local government areas in the state where we are working on the, the number of blind children are enough for government to establish a school for them.

'For instance, there are 198 schools in the nine local government areas we are monitoring and there are blind children there who are not in any school because, there is neither a single school for them, nor for the physically challenged.

''Instead we observed that most of the blind children resort to begging while their peers are in schools.

''We have had several appeals from parents of blind children to allow their children into schools in those areas, but we have always told them that they will only waste their time because they are supposed to be enrolled in special schools for the bind where they have specialised teachers and books.''

He further said that some parents of blind kids had pleaded with the monitoring team to come to the aid of their poor children, so that they would be enrolled into conventional schools like their peers,

even as he stressed that children in many remote communities in the state had no access to education.