The Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE) Project in Bauchi State says it is collaborating with stakeholders towards streamlining its activities for effective implementation of the Second Chance Education component of the project in the state.
The State Project Coordinator and Focal Person Dr Jamila Dahiru gave the indication during an advocacy visit to the management of the State Agency for Normadic Education BASANE in Bauchi.
Dr Jamila Dahiru said Bauchi being one of the eleven additional funding states under the project would be implementing the Second Chance component meant for adolescent girls who left school due to one reason or the other and are willing to re-enroll.
She said the visit was to intimate the agency about the project and their role as key implementors considering the various programmes being run which falls under the purview of the project to include creating Accessible, safe and enabling learning space for girls and boys especially for dropouts between the ages of 10 to 20.
The State Focal Person who said the project will last for five years, noted that part of the AGILE mandate is to build schools, provide support in form of Conditional Cash Transfer to financially disadvantaged girls, Digital and life skills, hygiene and reproductive health among others for them to become productive members of the society.
“When we talk about CCT, we’re talking of these adolescent girls who could not go to school because they can’t afford it, due to financial inadequacies. So we support them with little token just to motivate them to go to school”.
“We’re also targeting digital skills, life skills and others that would help them improve their capacity and be important members of the society”, Dr Jamila notes.
Responding, the Secretary State Agency for Normadic Education BASANE Musa Ibrahim Ardo who said the agency which currently boasts of over five hundred normadic schools with a little above eleven thousand pupils spread across all the twenty local government areas of the state, called for the recruitment of more teachers to bridge teacher/pupils ratio.
“We have actually requested for the recruitment of teachers and the Governor asked us to out it writing and Thank God this project of AGILE is coming up and we know it will go a long way in solving the problems of infrastructure and inadequate teachers”, Ardo says.
Musa Ardo disclosed that nine hundred and twenty five out of five thousand children trained at the six Normadic Vocational Centres operated in collaboration with the ministry of education have been successfully mainstreamed into boarding schools.
The Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment, (AGILE) Project is a World Bank assisted project of the Federal Ministry of Education geared at improving secondary education opportunities for adolescent girls aged between 10 and 20.