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THE CONTRIBUTION OF HUMAN AND MATERIAL RESOURCES ON QUALITY EDUCATION IN NIGERIA

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1     Background to the Study

Education is one of the largest contributors of the national economic performance and human advancement. However, it needs investment in terms of human and other resources. As (Smith, 2005) observe, education requires greater commitment than any other development activity. (Abid, 2007) adds that education needs skilled and highly trained and dedicated staff, quality curriculum, infrastructure and adequate teaching and learning materials. To provide all those resources, government, communities, parents and other educational stakeholders must have commitment to the educational sector.

Above all, education contributes to increased productivity (Galabawa, 2005). It is therefore, on the above grounds that make nations all over the globe strive to deliver quality education to their people at all possible means. Tanzania has been striving to expand secondary education since independence in 1961 to the present, guided with different policy stances over time. However, the expansion strategies have been coupled with various educational problems and challenges for planning. This is also supported by (Michaelowa, 2002) as he observes, that politicians and education bureaucratic alike are placing a lot of emphasis on quantitative expansion.

Education development in Tanzania is guided by both macro-economic and sectoral policies (UTR, 2010). The education training policy was the starting point for the development of education in contemporary Tanzania. Education training policy was boosted by two macro-economic policies which were formulated later in the late 1990’s namely the Poverty Reduction Paper and Tanzania Development vision 2025 (Hakielim, 2007).

Every country, African countries in particular, including Tanzania have quest for quality education, because education is the pivot for national development. Quality education is necessary for production of effective and efficient workforce for enhancement ofnational development issues. Education quality assurance is a continuous and challenging process. It is so because the world is not static, it is changing. One has to struggle for quality Education to enable the school leavers to face challenges and live successfully in the contemporary society (Hakielimu, 2011).

Education has been an important part in society and it has a great significance to us, education plays a major role in the development of our country as it provides a foundation upon which stable nations are built. It is necessary to invest in education because children can be labourers in the future. If a person is not educated enough then he/she will not be able to use the resources in future which will then spoil the future of the country. There is a famous saying,” if you give a man fish, you feed him for a day but if you teach the man to fish you feed him for a lifetime. So Ithink without education a country cannot be developed (Foster, 2006).

In order for these objectives to be successfully actualized, there are some fundamental needs that must be adequately provided. These basic needs include the resources of both human and materials. The secondary schools’ functions of teaching and learning are often pursued with a view of inculcating the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes to the students who are expected to complete their education and become useful in the development of theirsociety. There is more pressure on the socio-economic development of a developing nation like Tanzania. However, for her to actualize these goals of skilled graduates, adequate human and infrastructural facilities need to be put in place.

Undoubtedly the importance of a skilled graduate cannot be over- emphasized in the life of a nation trying to meet the development standards of the world. The Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT) is making policies that will help to actualize these but it is one thing to make sound policies, and another thing to implement these policies effectively and efficiently without the right quality and quantity of human and material resources in secondary schools. The nation had more than 5,000 secondary schools at the time of this study and yet the nation is facing mass failure of her vibrant population.

Today, the demand for secondary education worldwide is soaring due to progress towards universal primary school completion, large cohorts of young people searching for the key to a better life, and the global demand for an increasingly sophisticated labour force (world data, 2013). This heightened demand for secondary education is accompanied by the need to respond to the twin challenges of increasing access to and at the same time, improving quality and relevance of secondary education. These two overarching themes run through all other issues in secondary education (world data, 2013).

With this huge number of secondary schools in a nation that is just 50 years old, the expectations of many is that by now Tanzania ought to be one of the world’s leading producers and manufacturers in all fields of endeavour because there is the advantage of transferred knowledge and skills and so it is not starting from a scratch, instead we have a situation where Tanzania imports everything including food while Tanzania has abundant land and super weather. This is a distressing situation for many Tanzanians because a lot of money has been supposedly pumped into the secondary schools but no adequate result to show for it. 

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