Education, more than almost any other public investment, is understood to have the potential to reduce poverty, promote growth and prosperity and to reduce inequalities. However, research has shown that inequality still features prominently in Nigeria educational system. Intersecting inequalities are pervasive across all phases of education and transitions between them (early years, primary, secondary and tertiary) in Nigeria and across the world. They are linked to poverty and a range of other markers of disadvantage and discrimination.
To reduce educational inequality is a priority for educators, administrators, and policymakers. The Division works with policy makers and educators to provide empirical research that explores a variety of issues relating to poverty and inequality in education. Topics of focus include the effects that income disparity, race, gender, family backgrounds, and other factors can have on educational outcomes as well as the causes, patterns, and effects of poverty and inequality.
The Centre also provides solutions to the following:
- Furthering understanding about how education policy and practice can serve to mitigate the effects of intersecting inequalities and to improve social justice within and beyond the sector.
- How various forms, institutions, organisations, structures and delivery mechanisms of education contribute to contemporary inequalities
- How do political, economic, social and cultural aspects of historically framed contexts shape education inequalities and
- The role of education in reproducing and transforming these relationships