This is a very important observation from the Central Bank of Nigeria: “Another report projects the number of Nigerian students studying abroad to exceed 100,000 by 2022. Given this data, it’s crucial to highlight that between 2010 and 2020, foreign education expenses amounted to a substantial US$28.65 billion, as per the CBNs’ publicly available Balance of Payments Statistics. Similarly, medical treatment abroad has incurred around US$11.01 billion in costs during the same period. Consequently, over the past decade, foreign exchange demand for education and healthcare has totalled nearly US$40 billion.
“Notably, this amount surpasses the total current foreign exchange reserves of the CBN. Mitigating a significant portion of this demand could have resulted in a considerably stronger Naira today,” – Oluyemi Cardoso, Central Bank of Nigeria Governor.
So, if we have great schools and hospitals, Naira will breathe.
Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 16 (Feb 10 – May 3, 2025) opens registrations; register today for early bird discounts.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations here.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and invest in Africa’s finest startups here.
More so, if you focus on the education data, over ten years, close to $30 billion, meaning that we are spending $3 billion yearly on foreign education. This number is more than the total education budget of the federal government which hovers around $2 billion – $2.5 billion yearly. In other words, Nigerians spend more on foreign education than the federal government does in the nation’s educational systems. That is a revelation and shows a total failure in the educational sector in the last decade.
This is a very important observation from the Central Bank of Nigeria: “Another report projects the number of Nigerian students studying abroad to exceed 100,000 by 2022. Given this data, it’s crucial to highlight that between 2010 and 2020, foreign education expenses amounted to… pic.twitter.com/WOFHG7V5b1
— Ndubuisi Ekekwe (@ndekekwe) February 7, 2024
---
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 10 - May 3, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here.
The issue of foreign education has many facets, if you argue strictly on quality, you will miss the point. The weak naira also fuels the drive for foreign education, and as more people look for forex, naira weakens, and the cycle keeps repeating. Some will tell you it’s also about opportunities and exposure, so when you take everything together, you find out that Nigeria will need to do more than building and running good schools, the instructors and professors are also leaving.
If we want to spend massively on education, will government fund from primary schools to the universities heavily and still keep the tuition very low? I do not think it’s a realistic endeavour, anyone who thinks it is might be clueless.
Our best bet would be to make the basic education and vocational schools great, while the universities are given the autonomy to compete, both privately owned and public ones. Government funding to tertiary education should be targeted, that is partly funding research projects that lead to national competitiveness and also giving scholarships on fields of study that are key to national competitiveness, especially where there is shortage of talent.
We have to know how to build systems that work, not our chaotic ways.