Regen Education and Leadership Initiative (RELI), a registered non-governmental organization working in the area of SDG Goal 4 – Inclusive, high quality education for all – with offices in Osogbo, Osun State, paid a courtesy/advocacy visit to the Osun State office of the National Orientation Agency to explore areas of possible collaboration to support the implementation of the Federal Government’s National Language Policy in Education, which stipulates that children early years to primary six should be taught using the mother tongue.
The leader of the visiting RELI team, Mr. Adeyemi Adedeji said the NGO was working to assist government to address the challenges of training teachers in the use of the Mother Tongue for instruction in their various subject areas, development of instructional materials in the mother tongue and advocacy to schools and parents to embrace the National Language Policy in Education, the area in which the NGO needed the partnership with the National Orientation Agency.
Responding after RELI’s presentation, Dr. Bola Morgan, Director, NOA, Osun State, commended the RELI team for their passion, foresight and dexterity in articulating the NGO’s ideals, adding that it was rare to see young people driven by the need to preserve the nation’s native languages and culture.
Dr Morgan lauded RELI’s ambition to support the government’s effort to overcome the identified challenges in the path of Mother Tongue in Education in Nigeria. She informed the RELI team that one of the initiatives of the Director General, Mallam Lanre Issa-Onilu was to start a programme of Volunteer Community Brigadiers who would be equipped to conduct advocacy on national values to communities using the mother tongue. Dr. Morgan said RELI’s initiatives were therefore very much in line with the goals of the NOA which also conducts advocacy to schools on various issues critical to value reorientation – integrity, patriotism, honesty, respect for the elderly and for the community. She encouraged the RELI team to open communication with the office of the Director General who would then give directions on NOA’s collaborations with the NGO.
