Ogun State Governor, Prince Dapo Abiodun, has signed the State Education and Skills Trust Fund Bill into law, establishing a new framework for sustainable funding and improved management of the state’s education and skills development sector.
The law, signed on Friday at the Governor’s Office, Oke-Mosan, Abeokuta, is expected to provide an additional source of financing for education and skills development beyond the state’s annual budgetary allocation.
Speaking with journalists after the signing ceremony, the Speaker of the Ogun State House of Assembly, Rt. Hon. Oludaisi Elemide, said the legislation would strengthen the delivery of quality education and improve learning outcomes across the state.
Elemide said the law was designed to make education “more meaningful, more qualitative and more constructive,” noting that its passage followed extensive consultations with members of the public and relevant stakeholders.
“We are just trying to make education more meaningful, more qualitative and more constructive. It will be more encompassing; that is what the bill is all about,” he said.
The Speaker expressed optimism that effective implementation of the law would further strengthen the state’s education sector and sustain Ogun’s position as a major education destination in the country.
He, however, called for increased participation from the private sector, stressing that the resources required to adequately fund education could not be provided by government alone.
“The private people too need to contribute. After all, they are the ones that will inherit these people after being educated,” Elemide said.
Also speaking, the Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Prof. Abayomi Arigbabu, said the Trust Fund would cater for both formal and informal education, with particular attention to skills acquisition and vocational development.
According to him, the fund would provide an alternative source of financing for critical areas such as school infrastructure, bursaries, teacher support and maintenance, in addition to regular government funding.
“In other words, we have put in place a mechanism of ensuring that education can also still be funded through another source different from the normal budgetary allocation,” Arigbabu said.
Arigbabu explained that the state had previously operated under an executive bill signed by the governor about three years ago, adding that the passage of the legislation by the House of Assembly would now give stronger legal backing to the Trust Fund.
He said the law would also support the integration of informal education into the state’s education system through the re-engineering of the traditional apprenticeship model.
The commissioner disclosed that more than 9,000 youths had so far been trained in various vocations under the state’s skills development initiatives.
He added that the Education and Skills Trust Fund would provide additional resources to expand informal education, vocational training and other skills development programmes across Ogun State.
