The Visiting Finland’s Deputy Minister of External Economic Relations to Nigeria, Mr Matti Anttonen, on Wednesday expressed his government’s readiness to train Nigerian teachers.

Anttonen told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos that the plan was part of his government’s effort at ensuring that Nigerian teachers were well-grounded in the teaching profession.

The deputy minister said that because it would not be possible to send all Nigerian teachers to Finland, a large number of them would be selected to visit Finland as trainers.

“We are looking at the possibility of bringing some teacher trainers from Nigeria to Finland. It is expected that those trained in Finland would come back and share their knowledge with tens of thousands of Nigerian teachers.

We know that Nigeria is a very huge country, and that every year about seven million children are being born and every year five million children start schooling.

This means that Nigeria needs additional tens of thousands of well-trained teachers to be able to give qualitative education to these children,’’ he said.

Anttonen, also Finland’s Under-Secretary of State, said that it would be more cost-efficient and result-oriented to plan toward sending teacher trainers from Nigeria to Finland.

According to him, the proposal is already being looked into by Finland’s government, private sector and universities.

The under-secretary of state said that his government and Finland’s private sector and universities would “carefully find the right partners’’ from both countries before embarking on the proposal.

He said that there was a lot for Nigerian teachers to gain from the planned exchange of teaching experience programme with them in Finland.

(NAN)