Gombe Targets 100,000 Vulnerable Children, Youths in New Initiative

Segun Awofadeji

Gombe State Governor, Alhaji Muhammadu Yahaya has performed the groundbreaking ceremony of the At-Risk Children Project (ARC-P) in the state.

ARC-P is an initiative designed to provide a multi-pronged approach for the rehabilitation and reintegration of vulnerable children to support them attain their full potential.

Performing the exercise at the Government House, Yahaya said the launch of ARC-P in the state will go a long way in giving the vulnerable children a sense of belonging.

The governor said it was not a coincidence that the national launch of the At- Risk Children project took place in Gombe State, because according to him, with the signing of the MoU, ARC-P, his administration’s target was to further support at least 100,000 children and youths across the 11 local government areas to constructively live a life of dignity by providing them with necessary skills that would enable them harness their potentials and energies for the overall development of our state.

“Furthermore, out of our desire to tackle the problems of youth unemployment, we established a database for unemployed graduates in the state and so far we have registered over 17,000 job seekers and we are making concerted efforts to link them with necessary jobs that match their skills and training.

“The availability of this database put us ahead of other states in the selection of the pilot state for this project.

“Through this partnership, we shall equally train and engage not less than 2,000 youth for the enforcement of environmental sanitation and protection as well as road traffic regulations in the first phase of the project.

“In order to address these issues, the federal government through the office of the Special Adviser to the President on Social Investment came up with the ARC-P alongside other social intervention programmes so as to mop up these children and young adults from the streets and give them opportunities to realise their full potentials through a number of mechanisms being implemented at the state and local government areas level,” he explained.

Yahaya maintained that the initiative will help reduce poverty and insecurity while also providing solutions to the health, educational and social challenges facing these demographic group.

“On our part, our administration has keyed into all existing social intervention programmes and introduced new initiatives tailored towards finding and implementing local solutions to address the menace of out-of-school children, reduce poverty and provide job opportunities to our teeming youth. So far, we have mopped up over 300,000 out-of-school children and returned them back to classrooms.

“Similarly, we have established 290 girl-child non-formal learning centres across all the LGAs and enrolled about 47,126 girl-child.

“Our girl-child skills acquisition programme has seen us training over 3,000 girls on beads making, bakery and cosmetology and provided them with starter packs to enable them engage in decent means of livelihood,” he added.

He revealed that his administration recently conducted an enumeration through the Better Education and Service Delivery for All (BESDA) project where it was estimated that there are over 700,000 out-of-school children spread across all the 11 local government areas of the state, a statistics he noted was above the UNICEF’s estimated figure of about 550,000.

“The Almajiri system as practiced today is characterised by child neglect, abuse, social exclusion and chronic poverty thus churning out young people with little or no formal education and lacking employable skills thereby posing significant social and economic challenges to themselves, the government and the society at large.

“To add to this, our girl-child population are mostly exposed to street hawking, child labour and often end up in commercial domestic services rather than pursuit of formal education in a bit to provide livelihood to their families.

“This exposes them to sexual exploitation and various degrees of gender-based violence,” he said.

He said in order to domesticate the convention on the rights of the child, his administration has drafted the child rights bill which is presently before the state house of assembly and has passed second reading.