The Global Monitoring Report on Education-for-All (EFA) of 2012, rated Nigeria as one of the two countries; the other being Egypt with the largest number of illiterates in Africa.

Poor financial literacy is another. It is only when the vast majority of the Nigerian population is financially literate that they can participate in the formal financial system; the reverse is the case.

The number of out-of-school children in Nigeria has increased from 7.4 million in 2000 to 10.5 million in 2010.

There are several challenges facing education generally in Nigeria. There has been a steady decline in standards in the visual arts, as in other disciplines. Today, there are very poor facilities for teaching art in almost all art schools in Nigeria.

Up till now, majority of our people in Nigerian do not know what adult education has for them – even some of the students we lecture here. Each year, we set aside a week for them, which we tag the ‘Orientation Week’, to enlighten them on what adult education stands for. And then, they begin to ask questions on what they could do as an adult educator; and I say to them that it’s a kind of discipline that could make them function in any society. An Adult Educator could get appointment at various ministries. We have agencies for Adult and Non-Formal Education all over the country; and of course, recently, there was an edict passed by the Nigerian National Association of Adult Education (NNAAE) which made the federal government give a statement that every existing university in Nigeria must have an Adult Education Department; and that all colleges of education must also have a Department of Adult Education.

When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

Financial illiteracy results in poor financial inclusion. Non-financial inclusion becomes a threat to the survival of the Nigerian financial sector as most adults and young Nigerians are financially excluded from the formal financial sector. A high percentage of adult Nigerians don’t have bank accounts, and this in the long run becomes a big headache for central banking.

All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 percent of Americans are “scientifically illiterate.” That’s just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War — when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there’s a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 percent illiteracy is extremely serious.

Adult education is a multi-disciplinary field that is all-embracing. It’s all-embracing in that up till now, we have not even got a precise definition of adult education. A layman sees adult education as a kind of education for elderly people, forgetting that the constitutional definition of adult education in Nigeria starts from the age of 18. However, there are different definitions of who an adult is from country to country, region to region, state to state.

There are several challenges facing education generally in Nigeria. There has been a steady decline in standards in the visual arts, as in other disciplines. These problems are multifarious and overwhelming! At the University of Benin art school, graduates of the college up till 1988 continued to speak glowingly about the crop of seasoned lecturers we had- Pa Omo Osagie, Osi Audu, Iro Eweka, Ademola Williams, Sammy Laye, Kweku Mensah, Akpo Teye, Ademola Williams, Emmanuel Ifeta, Irma Francis, Mr. Onemu, Norman Rosen etc. As students, the university provided materials for our art projects and we had great facilities and adequate studio spaces.

This means that the number of illiterates increases as more children are out of school.

Lots of literacy in modern society, but not enough numeracy.

This, then, is the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read but don't. [...] This new illiteracy is more pernicious than the old, because unlike the old illiteracy it does not debar its victims from power and influence, although like the old illiteracy it disqualifies them for it. Those long-dead men and women who learned to read so that they might read the Bible and John Bunyan would tell us that pride is the greatest of all sins, the father of sin. And the victims of the new illiteracy are proud of it. If you don't believe me, talk to them and see with what pride they trumpet their utter ignorance of any book you care to name.

That more than 90 per cent of the Indian population should continue to be illiterate even after 175 years of British rule in this country is an intolerable situation which calls for immediate action.