iii. Attention in the area of Access and Equity has concentrated on accelerating enrolment in all sectors of education. At the basic education level, attention has been paid to the reduction of the number of out-of-school children totaling 10.1million in Nigeria. this started with the National Campaign on Access to Education followed with a number of initiatives including: the Almajiri Education Programme which has led to the construction of 135 day and boarding schools in the participating Northern States. The Girls’ Child Education and the Special vocational Education Programmes are targeting both girls and boys in the drive for greater access. At the tertiary level, progress have been made in increasing access through the establishment of 12 new conventional Federal Universities in e.g., Lafia, Lokoja, Otuoke, Wukari, Dutse, etc and a specialized one. Four new Federal Polytechnics have also been established to address the need for Technical and Vocational Education. Attention has also been given to alternative routes to higher education especially through Open and Distance Education. Nine new private universities that met requirements have been licensed to participate in the provision of quality tertiary education. The result of the above initiatives is that for the first time Nigeria recorded a ratio of student to textbook of 1:1 due to the provision of a total number of 4.88million free instructional materials in the core subject areas in primary and junior secondary schools valued at the cost of 6.02billion naira. Further, the result of the Needs Assessment of Public Universities provided a commitment of 1.3 trillion naira over five years period for direct infrastructural and equipments intervention. Similar assessments have been carried out for public polytechnics and Collages of Education. So far, a total of 15 billion naira had been committed to the development and rehabilitation of laboratories in 51 Federal and State Polytechnics. iv. Funding the Education Sector: - To cater for 36 Federal universities, 25 Federal Polytechnics, 22 Federal Colleges of Education and 104 Federal unity colleges, the Federal Ministry of Education’s annual budgetary allocations stood at 306.3bn naira in 2011, 400.15bn in 2012, 425.53bn in 2013, 493bn in 2014, 492bn in 2015, down to 369bn in 2016 and 398.01bn in 2017, out of each year’s total annual budget, accounting for less than 10% of each year’s budget and less than 26% of UNESCO’s threshold for all countries. v. Table XXX below shows budget releases made by the Federal Government from the 2016 budget in 2017 on the primary School Feeding Programme aimed at boosting pupils’ enrolment, retention and comp0letion, especially for the Girl-Child. The table shows over 631 million naira released for school feeding in 7 pilot states of the federation, paid to a total of 11,775 cooks, meant to feed over one million primary school pupils. 89