The Niger government says it will use the At-Risk Project (ARC-P) of the Federal Government to empower no fewer than 125,000 out-of-school children in the state.
Dr Amina Bello, the wife of the state governor, said this at a two-day stakeholders workshop on the implementation of the At-Risk children programme in Minna on Tuesday.
Bello explained that the project would be implemented across the 25 local government areas in the state where 1,250 youths would be trained as facilitators to mentor and monitor vulnerable children on life-time skills.
“The project will be implemented in two batches, 1250 youths unemployed youths will be trained as facilitators and each of them will be assigned with 50 children in the first batch and another 50 children on the second to mentor them on life-time skills,” she explained.
She explained further that the project was an intervention “that offers a multi-dimensional broad-spectrum approach to address the about 13.2 million number of out-of-school children as estimated by UNICEF in Nigeria”.
According to her, the northern part of the country, including Niger, has been devastated accounting for 69 per cent of the disadvantaged children scattered across the region.
She stressed that the state government was committed to seeking innovative approaches to promote inclusion and equity in access to education as well as leverage the opportunities of digital innovation.
This, she said, was to ensure the empowerment of the girl-child and other underrepresented groups.
Earlier in his remarks, Alhaji Ahmed Matane, the Secretary to the State Government, lauded the Federal Government for initiating the project meant to provide solutions to the documented vulnerabilities of children lacking basic social protection across an array of need.
He gave assurance that the state government would leverage the existing state initiatives and programmes to provide support and strengthen efforts for effective implementation of the project in the state.
In her address, Hajiya Maryam Uwais, Special Adviser to the President on Social Investment, said that the project was targeted at vulnerable groups to address their challenges.
Uwais said this was expected to be done using a roadmap developed by Niger with data to equip children with life-time skills to make them self-reliance.
“This project is to empower people who have never had opportunity, we will empower the children to take ownership of their lives as they grow, to give them hope to live a life of dignity,” she said.
She said “ARC-P’s vision is to comprehensively address cross-cutting concerns of At-Risk children who deal daily with violence, abuse, neglect, exploitation and exclusion to provide them with a life of dignity”.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that ARC-P is a solution to the prolonged and well-documented vulnerabilities of children who have lacked social protection and the luxury of basic formal education.(NAN)(www.nannews.ng)
