ANTICIPATING THE UNFORESEEN: RISK MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION IN SOUTH-WEST, NIGERIA

Abstract

Nigeria's early childhood education is broadly acknowledged in policy and continues to be hampered by delivery problems which pedagogy has not been able to overcome. This study reframes ECE delivery as a risk-laden operational enterprise and examines, in a rarely studied Nigerian context, the status of risk management practice in ECE schools, the operational risks most prevalent in them, and the challenges constraining their management. The study used a descriptive survey design, supported by the project risk management framework presented in PMBOK Guide (Project Management Institute, 2021) and Hillson (2017). A total of 104 responses were collected from six South-West states using purposive and snowball sampling with 2.50 as the criterion for analysis, of which 103 were analysed. Overall, risk management practice was identified as being largely reactive, with risk response being the most advanced dimension (M = 2.74), and risk identification the least (M = 2.20). The overall mean score (M = 2.47) was below criterion. The most common risks were teacher and care provider attrition (M = 2.81), infrastructural failure (M = 2.80), and disease outbreak (M = 2.73) with funding interruption being the lowest (M = 2.35). Absence of formal training (M = 2.61), staffing shortages (M = 2.83), and time pressure (M = 2.75) were the three top implementation challenges, with time pressure having the highest median score.The study finds that anticipatory risk management is an important but lesser developed dimension of ECE delivery in Nigeria, which is more limited by structural capacity than awareness, and suggests that it be incorporated into ECE training and supervision.