NJEA Volume 10 Number 3 2025

BELGIAN AND HAITIAN EDUCATIONS: LESSONS FOR THE NIGERIAN EDUCATION SYSTEM

Anikpe Anthony Mbah Christopher Nnaemeka Ogugua
Abstract

One of the blessings colonization brought to Nigeria is education. With education, Nigeria as a country parades some of the best professionals all over the globe, especially in North America and Western Europe. However, in spite of all these remarkable achievements, experts still believe that the management of the country’s education is one of the worst in the world. For instance, it is argued that this is one of the reasons Nigeria has not been able to transform its huge population and natural resources into developmental indexes. Okadigbo once noted that most leaders of national governments of Nigeria do not have the benefit of formal intellectual training…the conception of selfless services and pursuit of good of every citizen’s is not present. Today, Nigeria has a mono-economy that runs predominantly on oil. Also, in spite of the many number of professors in the country, there is poor synergy between Nigerian schools and the labour market on the one hand and little or no innovations coming from the schools to boast the labour market. Consequently, this research applies the method of analysis to compare the educations of Belgium and Haiti in order to find out how the lessons learnt can help to improve Nigerian education. The study discovered that there are a number of similarities and dissimilarities in Belgian and Haitian education. In the first instance, the ownership of educations in both countries are both private and public. The major difference is that the government in Belgium has a greater say in education. Structurally, education in the two countries are also similar. The difference lies in the management of the systems. Whereas the Belgian system runs smoothly due to availability of funding, the Haitian system is punctuated with irregularities as a result of lack of funding. Also, while the curriculum of Haitian education does not represent the need of the country, there is a close synergy between education in Belgium and the need of the country. What is clear from the comparison is that education is better in Belgium than in Haiti. The reason comes from two major areas: funding and relevance of the curricula. Looking at the roles education plays in development and the variances in the developmental indexes of the two countries the paper concludes that the lack of development in Haiti is due to lack of progress in education. It recommended that to improve its education system and chances of development, Nigeria must firstly, increase its budgetary allocation to education. Secondly, Nigerian education curriculum should be restructured to reflect the need of the coun

Keywords: belgian, education, educations, haitian, lessons, nigerian, system
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