The UK-based international charity organization, IA-Foundation has offered to assist the Edo Government to take out-of-school children in the state back to classrooms.
The Chief Executive Officer of IA-Foundation, Ibironke Adeagbo, made the announcement in a telephone interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) Sunday in Abuja.
She was reacting to a recent pronouncement by the Governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki, that the state would prosecute parents and guardians, whose children and wards are out of school.
Obaseki, who made the pronouncement in a speech to mark the World Day Against Child Labour, commemorated globally on June 12, vowed that the Edo Government would not fail to prosecute parents and guardians of out-of-school children.
Adeagbo said also that IA-Foundation would take up payment of school fees of children whose parents were killed in the recent attack of a church in Owo, Ondo State.
“IA-Foundation will take care of the payment of the school fees and other related expenditures of the children who have become orphans, following the Owo attack until the completion of their secondary education,’’ she stated.
IA-Foundation, which has been at the forefront of promoting child rights in Nigeria has been working assiduously to reduce the number of out-of-school in the West African country, which is home to 10.5 million out-of- school kids.
The group recently offered scholarships to 50 deprived children in Lagos State, to enable them to have access to education.
Adeagbo said that IA-Foundation had commenced collaborations with other UK charities to hold a confab in the British Parliament later this year, to bring international attention on the importance of giving education to the girl-child in Nigeria.
According to her, the confab with the theme: “The Educated Girl – Transformer of Nigeria’s Future’’, will underscore the need for the Nigerian Government to give needed attention to issues concerning the girl-child.
Speaking also on the finding of one of the girls kidnapped by jihadists eight years ago from Government Girls’ Secondary School, Chibok in Borno in Nigeria’s North East, Adeagbo said the development was heart-warming.
She said that every Nigerian child had inalienable right to education, pleading with the Federal Government to put measures in place to eradicate abductions of Nigerian kids while in school.
It will be recalled that the Nigerian Army found one of the kidnapped Chibok girls, identified as Mary Ngoshe with her son on June 14 at a village, called Ngoshe in Borno.
Some 276 school girls were abducted by jihadists in Chibok on April 14, 2014, in an incident that jolted Nigeria and the global community.
About 103 of the kidnapped girls were later rescued by Nigerian troops but others have remained unaccounted for since the incident.
Many other cases of abductions of school children have taken place in various communities in Northern Nigeria, the epi-centre of a bloody jihadist insurgency that started in 2009.
The Federal Government (FG) has however, been fighting back relentlessly to crush the jihadists, who are unrelenting in their push to enthrone a strict Islamic code in Nigeria, which is Africa’s most populous nation.
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