Two years of free pre-primary education, six months of paid maternity leave, and four weeks of paid paternity leave are the three policies that UNICEF says the Nigerian government must implement to reverse the poor physical and mental growth of children in the country.

Nigeria currently has only one year of free pre-primary education, three months of paid maternity leave, and no paternity leave at all.

At the national Early Childhood Development (ECD) conference in Abuja last week, the UN children’s agency lamented that critical national policies have failed to provide enough foundation for children’s growth.

As Unicef is proposing new policies, the previous ones it helped Nigerian government to develop have not been implemented, otherwise the appalling physical and mental growth status of the children would have been improved upon.

Pre-primary education is an aspect of ECD that has been neglected by government and left for the private sector and development partners.

Ten years ago, Unicef supported the development of the national policy for integrated ECD in Nigeria.

After six years of inaction on the policy by the government, Unicef helped the Federal Ministry of Education to develop the guidelines for implementing the policy in 2013.

One year later, Unicef supported the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) to develop one-year primary school education curriculum and also supported the development of teacher’s guild for one-year pre-primary school education curriculum.

In 2015, Unicef supported the Federal Ministry of Education to develop the early childhood development standards for Nigeria.

Unicef in 2016 developed ECD teaching methodologies with a focus on Reggio Emilia and other child-centred approaches.

Last week, Unicef gathered ECD specialists from around the world for a three-day conference to tell the Nigerian leaders the importance of investing early in every Nigerian child and to understand that early years matter.

But for the government, investing in early childhood education does not really matter.  While the Federal Ministry of Education will spend N205.8 million to purchase three exotic Toyota LC V8 2016 model at the rate of N68.6 million each, it will spend just N7.2 million for all the activities to improve early childhood education this year.

Part of the N7.2 million earmarked for early childhood education will also be used to fund capacity building for caregivers across the states of the federation.

With this meagre budget for pre-primary education, any significant effort to improve early childhood education will still fall on Unicef and other non-governmental organisations.

Early childhood education as stated in the national policy on education covers the pre-primary school (day-care and nursery) until a child reaches the official school age of 6 years to start primary school.

As important as this formative education is in a child’s cognitive development, only 35 percent of children who are within three to five years are attending an organised early childhood education programme.

Nigeria’s poor status in early childhood education is largely caused by the northern part of the country where enrolment has remained extremely low. In Yobe and Sokoto states, less than 5 percent of eligible children are attending organised early childhood education programme. Apart from Kaduna State, the rest of the 12 states in the northwest and northeast have less than 20 percent of the children attending early childhood education. Meanwhile, in the southern Nigeria, more than 80 percent of the children are attending early childhood education. Ekiti, Imo, Enugu, and Anambra states have more than 90 percent of the children enrolled in pre-primary education.

“Investing in Early Childhood Development including services to support caregivers, quality pre-primary education and good nutrition will help to secure healthy and productive future generations in Nigeria,” says Mohamed Fall, Unicef representative in Nigeria.

During the conference, Unicef launched its new global report on ECD, Early Moments Matter for every child.

“The early moments of life offer an unparalleled opportunity to build the brains of the children who will build the future. But far too often, it is an opportunity squandered,” the report says.

“For nations, the price of not investing in early moments is children with poorer health, fewer learning skills and reduced earning potential. It is a weaker economy and a greater burden on health, education and welfare systems. It is intergenerational cycles of disadvantage that hinder equitable growth and prosperity.”

Swadchet Sankey, Unicef education specialist told the ICIR that investment in pre-primary education is substantially lacking in Nigeria, stressing the need to increase awareness among parents, teachers and government.

“They need to invest more money in training teachers, adding the right curriculum, the right materials,” Sankey says.

“You go to some schools; they only supply books for their primary. It’s like they are just an addendum. Even supervisors when they go to supervise, they hardly enter the pre-primary. When they are training teachers, they only teach the primary school and JSS or they will involve some of the pre-primary but the training they are giving them is not relevant to what they should be doing.”

The evidence is very clear: children who have access to quality pre-primary education do better in primary school and they earn more as adults compared to those who have not had the chance to go through quality pre-primary education.

But the hurdle is convincing an unwilling government that it is better to invest in early childhood education than buying exotic vehicles for officials of the ministry of education.

Anyway, progress is being made as Sunny Echono, the Permanent Secretary of Ministry of Education, pledges that 5 percent of universal basic education intervention fund will now be dedicated to developing the early childhood education.