Minister of State for Education Professor Suwaiba Sa’id Ahmad has flagged off a campaign tagged ‘Madubi’ under the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Employment AGILE Project aimed at increasing public awareness and action around girl-child education in Nigeria.
The “Madubi” campaign which means “Mirror” in Hausa language was unveiled during a Road Walk in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city on Thursday.
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.
Professor Suwaiba said the campaign is for the girl to see herself as a mirror for a better future.
“We support every programme that seeks to empower the girl-child.
“AGILE is wonderful in terms of giving opportunity to the girl-child by providing access and opportunity for the girl-child to flourish in our society,” she said.
The Minister expressed the importance of girl-child education in advancing development in the country, noting that more support would be giving to the initiative.
“At the Federal Ministry of Education, we have our own programme that we are going to launch soon to ensure that we empower the girl-child.
“President Bola Tunibu’s administration is passionate about girls’ child education and committed to providing all the necessary support and measures to ensure that our girls are educated beyond the secondary school level,” she said.
Adolescent girls in Nigeria are generally faced with challenges that prevent them from accessing and completing secondary education due to socio-cultural, financial constraints, and infrastructural deficits.
The AGILE Project is meant to improve secondary education opportunities in the implementing states by tackling these challenges, thus making education more appealing to adolescent girls, parents, communities, and institutions.
The National Project Coordinator of the AGILE Project, Mrs. Amina Haruna, said the program aims to bring the schools closer to the girls.
“We don’t want her to walk far, and according to the policy of education no girl child or no child should walk more than 5 kilometers to access school.”
“We have renovated about 10,000 classrooms.
We have built about 475 schools; where there’s a junior primary school, we try to build a junior secondary school, and where there’s a junior secondary school, we build a senior secondary school.
“We build more classrooms and trying to build more wash facilities, water, sanitation, hygiene, to give more scholarships to the poorest households so that we have a lot of these girls in our school.”
“And this is what we are doing to bring the school closer for her. So that transition from one level to the other will be easier for the adolescent girls, and our plans for 2025 is to accelerate on what we have been doing.”
Mrs. Haruna added that under the AGILE program everything possible is done to bring more teaching and learning materials into schools in various communities so that both the teachers and the learners will be able to use all the instructional resources for effective and efficient teaching and learning.
“We had a conference with traditional religious leaders to inform the community to inform Nigerian citizens that this is what the Federal Government of Nigeria under the Federal Ministry of Education is doing under the Agile Project.
She said the AGILE project will improve on successes recorded over there years in 2025, build more WASH facilities and give more scholarships to poor household.
The current implementing states of the AGILE Project are 18 in number including Borno State, Ekiti, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, and Plateau
The states were selected through a consultative process involving the Federal Ministry of Education, Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, State Governors, and State Ministries of Education. The selection criteria, among others, included the number of out-of-school Girls, secondary school transition rates, the existence of enabling policies on girls’ education, as well as the States’ engagement and commitment to improving Girls’ educational attainment and empowerment.
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