The Federal Ministry of Education said it is targeting at least 12 million students to have access to Nigeria Learning Passport, its online platform, by 2025.
The Nigeria Learning Passport is part of the global Learning Passport initiative developed in 2018 through a collaboration between UNICEF and Microsoft.
This initiative enabled millions of children and youth affected by crises and displacement to continue accessing quality education. The platform, first deployed in Timor Leste, was taken up by multiple countries during the pandemic to enable learning continuity during school closures.
The Federal Ministry of Education developed the Learning Passport with support from UNICEF and GPE. It enhances traditional education delivery by enabling a hybrid program involving both classroom-based instruction and remote learning.
The Learning Passport is a digital learning platform with online, mobile, and offline capability that enables continuous access to quality education. It is flexible and adaptable, allowing learners and teachers to easily adopt it as their learning management system or use it to complement existing digital learning platforms.
Students can access a variety of content via a mobile app or web browser. Learning material can then be downloaded onto mobiles, tablets, or computers without connectivity. The platform is open to all children in Nigeria and hosts over 14,000 curriculum mapped instructional and supplementary learning materials for Primary and Secondary school students. The content is offered in English and the Nigerian languages of Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba.
The upcoming offline version of the Learning Passport will provide an opportunity for learning to students who live in places with intermittent or no internet connectivity often locations where children find themselves unable to access quality education.
The NLP makes learning possible even outside the confines of a school which will help address the spiraling numbers of school-age children unable to learn, especially in states where insecurity hinders access to schools. Importantly, Learning Passport provides an opportunity for teachers to access quality teaching guides and resources along with digitized capacity building modules.
The goal is to provide an effective solution to address learning poverty and close equity gaps for children both in school and out of school by enabling quality, inclusive and flexible learning to accommodate students’ diverse needs and learning trajectories.
Additionally, over 40,000 teachers have received training on using the Learning Passport along with tools such as lesson plans to empower themselves to support their students by integrating this digital solution meaningfully with quality teaching It is expected that three million students will access the platform in 2022 and at least 12 million by 2025.
With this new platform, the country hopes to recover some of the gains lost during the pandemic and continue to accelerate access to equitable, quality education for every child and youth in Nigeria. The Nigeria Learning Passport is accessible from the Federal Ministry of Education (FME) website at https://nlp.education.gov.ng/.
