Victor Mba, head of the Abuja office of Philip Consulting, has stated that states in the Northern part of Nigeria are the lowest ranking states in terms of literacy due to the persistent case of insecurity.
Mba said in an interview with ARISE NEWS on Friday while assessing the socio-economic performance of Nigerian States via the State Performance Index report for 2023.
The State Performance Index report for 2023 is a report that combines subjective data for credible publicly available sources with subjective data derived from service of residents and indigenes of a state to assess the socio-economic performance of the Nigerian States.
Mba said “The literacy rate is something that some states don’t take as seriously as they should. It is directly related to development. When you educate people, they contribute to the development. It might not be immediate but it’s a long-term development.
“In terms of debt, debt in itself is not a bad thing but the question is, are we borrowing for consumption or borrowing for investment. The more you are able to attract debt as a state, it shows you are doing something right for people to even be able to give you the money.
“For literacy, States that rank high, Lagos is high, Anambra, Abia and the low-ranking states are those in the north because of the insecurity that has persisted there.”
He also said the essence of the State Performance Index Report is to form collaboration between states for better performance in the state and the country at large.
“The whole essence of this report is to form a collaboration between the states and not in any way a name and shame scheme. We want a situation where the failing ones will look at other states where they are performing better and draw from those states.
“In terms of how we arrived at the ranking, the first thing that we did is to come up with indicators, 35 of them, grouped into performance indicators, those that can be measured using secondary data and those who can be measured using surveys.
“Then we benchmarked each state against the best performing state, multiplied by the ranking and that gave us our overall ranking for each of the states. In terms of the outlook, how we arrived at the outlook by looking at the potentials in the states, what they plan to do and how we see them in the next one year
“With respect to the GDP, the last time the GDP of Nigeria was measured was in like two or three years back, so we used that data to look at the states and that is one of the indicators we looked at when looking at the socio-economic performance of the states.”
Chioma Kalu
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