The Kaduna State Government on Monday said that it recruited 1,800 teachers to meet the needs of schools and enhance quality in the education system in the state.
The Director-General of Media to Kuduna State Governor, Ahmed Maiyaki, said in Kaduna that the government had also retrained 10,000 teachers in public schools as part of its effort to boost the educational sector.
He said the state government embarked on schools rehabilitation following a study which revealed that about 5,000 public schools require such intervention.
The director-general said the state government would require about N15 billion in the next few years to rehabilitate and equip the schools to raise them to global standard.
The governor’s spokesman said already, 200 schools had been rehabilitated, upgraded and fully equipped with laboratory and library materials as part of deliberate efforts to meet the challenges in the sector.
Maiyaki said that government’s intervention in the sector over the last two years had raised schools’ enrolment to 1, 185, 455 as at the 2014/2015 session.
He also added that the impact of the intervention had manifested in the performance of students that sat for WAEC in 2014, in which the state emerged third best in the country after Lagos and Edo.
On tertiary education, he said the state established a university in Kafanchan to offer opportunity to thousands of qualified candidates from the state.
He said that the new university would utilise existing structures at the Kaduna State University campus in Kafanchan while funds for other structures would be sourced from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund.
Maiyaki said that the state government had resuscitated the state foreign scholarship scheme abandoned since the second republic.
He said so far, the government had spent more than N960 million on 153 students currently studying for second and third degrees in about 14 universities outside Nigeria.
He said the focus was on critical courses, including medicine that would add value to the social and economic development of the state.
The spokesman urged people of the state to continue their support to the administration to enable it render more services that would impact positively on their lives.
He said that the government was not unmindful of existing challenges in the education sector and was determined to address them fully.