The Gombe State Government has launched the At-Risk Children Project (ARC-P) which seeks to rehabilitate children and youths across the state to a life of dignity.
The At-Risk Children Project is standing on seven pillars of literacy and numeracy, health and nutrition, digital skills, vocational and financial skills, life skills and sports, gatekeeper intervention (cooperative, incentivization) and agriculture and climate issues.
It is an initiative of the Presidency designed to provide a multidimensional wide-ranging approach to the crisis of vulnerable children, including Almajiri children, street children and youths potentially at risk physically and psychologically.
The project will define and classify who the at-risk children are, identify the challenges faced by out-of-school children, youths and assess them based on current efforts made by the Gombe State Government.
The objectives of the project cover the review of current methods and processes to address the challenges by adding value to the existing efforts and structures within the state and then key into the new innovations and creative solutions in line with the various approaches as provided for by the ARC-Project.
Governor Muhammadu Inuwa Yahaya said the Project would further support at least 100 thousand children and youth across our 11 local government areas with relevant skills that would enable the state to harness their potentials and energies for the overall development of the state and enable them to constructively live a life of dignity.
The Gombe State Governor the first phase of the project would train and engage not less than 2,000 youths for the enforcement of environmental sanitation and protection, as well as road traffic regulations in the first phase of the project.
Governor Yahaya said In order to facilitate the smooth take-off of the project, the state government had provided a befitting office accommodation deployed relevant competent staff and appointed a project advisory committee to oversee the implementation of the interventions in the state.
He said the administration had keyed into all existing social intervention programmes and introduced new initiatives geared 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.
“Addressing this phenomenon will no doubt help to reduce poverty and insecurity while also addressing the health, educational and social challenges facing this very important demographic group. On our part, our So far, we have mopped up over 300,000 out-of-school children and returned them back to classrooms,” Governor Yahaya said.
He said the government had 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. Out of our desire to tackle the problems of youth unemployment, we established a database for unemployed graduates in the state. 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,” he said.
The National Coordinator of the At-Risk Children Project and Special Adviser to the President on Social Investment, Hajia Maryam Uwais, commended Governor Yahaya for being the first in the country to attract the implementation of the Project in the State.
She described the support and enthusiasm displayed by the state towards the successful implementation of the ARC Project as incredible, one that would lead to the successful implementation of the project.
Dr Tusha Rani from the United Nations Children Education Fund, UNICEF Field Office in Bauchi, praise the Gombe State Government for championing a bill for the protection of the rights of the child, saying no child deserves to be exposed to unnecessary molestation and abuse.
PIAK
