Kaduna State Governor, Malam Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai has said that, adolescents who constitute 31.7 per cent of the Nigerian population must be given quality education to avoid future tragedy for the country.
Governor El-Rufai said, though, if the country is able to educate the adolescents, they will contribute meaningfully to the nation’s social and economic development.
El-Rufai stated this in Kaduna on Wednesday at the launch of Adolescent Girl Initiative in Northern Nigeria spear-headed by the UNFPA and CIDA in response to improved safety for school girls, delayed marriage and female empowerment through access to education.
Governor El-Rufai said, “According to the Nigerian Population Commission, adolescents constitute 31.7% of our population; this percentage is divided in nearly equal proportions of 50.1% male and 49.9% female. Interestingly, of Nigeria’s youthful population, 44.5% are less than 15 years of age while 16.4% are young people aged 15-24 years and 49% are 10-24 years. This underscores the importance of investing and developing our young population to the extent that they contribute effectively to National development.
“It is an opportunity if we are able to make this demographic healthy and educated thereby enabling it to contribute to social and economic development. It becomes a tragedy when they grow to adulthood unhealthy or ignorant or both. This tragedy even gets worse as according to estimates, this figure is expected to grow to 2 billion young people by 2050,” he said.
He said, his government has identified the dearth of quality and free basic education as an impediment to its continued growth and has demonstrated a commitment to addressing it through provision of bursaries and scholarships, a free 9 year education policy which covers tuition, uniform and all associated costs from primary 1 to JSS 3 in addition to its School Feeding Program that ensures that nearly 1.8 million pupils gets at least one meal a day in the schools.
According to him “in spite of these measures, we know that there is still much to be done: we must support policies that address retention in secondary schools to the extent that the large dropout rates and high levels of illiteracy are reduced drastically. This is why we seek to expand our education policy to include senior secondary schools, and as soon as we can marginally increase our internally generated revenues, we will ensure that education is free and compulsory at the primary and secondary levels.”
El-Rufai reiterated that, the large number of school-aged children currently engaged in street hawking or begging and other inhumane practices is appalling at best and they were taking measures to arrest it. Adding that, “We have enacted the Street Begging and Hawking (Prohibition) Law that will come into effect next month to ensure that every child above the age of 6 in Kaduna goes to school.
“We are pleased with the pilot of the adolescent girls’ initiative in Northern Nigeria spear-headed by the UNFPA and CIDA in response to improved safety for school girls, delayed marriage and female empowerment through access to education took off in Zaria. This collaborative event with the Ahmadu Bello University’s Population and Reproductive Health Initiative, and the Bixby Center for Population, Health & Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley is a commendable and timely response which so far, has benefitted 425 of Kaduna’s adolescent girls.
“We thank the Government of Canada for their belief in the future of the adolescent Nigerian girl with the additional funding they are providing to scale-up the Adolescent Girl Initiative to an estimated reach of 9,250 more girls both here and in several other Northern States,” El-Rufai said.
Earlier in her remarks, Representative of the Canadian High Commission, Miss. Nancy said, Northern Nigeria, has the highest rates of female illiteracy in the country and account for negative health outcomes which include, the highest maternal mortality ratio (MMR) and infant mortality as well as the highest rate of early marriage.
She said, the Adolescent Girls Initiative in Northern Nigeria, is a UNFPA-supported programme that teaches vulnerable girls about their rights, their bodies and health. Adding that, “The goal of the Initiative is to improve the social, economic and health wellbeing of rural and low-income urban adolescent girls and secure their future through increased access to education (make them stay in school), sexual reproductive health information/services and life-skills that will positively impact on health choices.
She equally pledged the commitment of the Canadian government to the girl child education project in Nigeria.
The programme, which also had in attendance, wives of the Governor of Kaduna, Yobe and Bauchi who equally made public commitment to work towards promotion of girl child education in their respective states.