By AbdulRaheem Aodu
Kaduna
Kaduna state Governor, Malam Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai has advised that adolescents, who constitute 31.7 percent of the Nigerian population, should be given quality education to avoid future tragedy for the country.
In his address at the launch of Adolescent Girl Initiative in Northern Nigeria, the governor said that if the country was able to educate its adolescents, they will contribute meaningfully to the economic development of the nation.
The launch was organised by UNFPA and CIDA in response to violence suffered by school girls, early marriage and low female empowerment from poor access to education.
El-Rufai said “according to the Nigerian Population Commission, adolescents constitute 31.7 per cent of our population; this percentage is divided in nearly equal proportions of 50.1per cent and 49.9 per cent female.
“Interestingly, Nigeria’s youthful population of 44.5 per cent is less than 15 years of age while 16.4 per cent is young people aged between 15-24 years and 49 per cent is10-24 years. This underscores the importance of investing and developing our young population to the extent that they contribute effectively to national development.
“It is an opportunity if we are able to make this demographic healthy and educated, thereby enabling it to contribute to social and economic development. It becomes a tragedy when they grow to adulthood unhealthy or ignorant or both. This tragedy even gets worse as according to estimates, this figure is expected to grow to 2 billion young people by 2050,” he said.
His government, according to hi, has identified the dearth of quality and free basic education as an impediment to its continued growth and has demonstrated a commitment to addressing it through provision of bursaries and scholarships, a free 9-year education policy which covers tuition, uniform and all associated costs from primary 1 to JSS 3 in addition to its School Feeding programme that ensures that nearly 1.8 million pupils gets at least one meal a day in the schools.
“Despite these measures, we know that there is still much to be done. We must support policies that address retention in secondary schools to the extent that the large dropout rates and high levels of illiteracy are reduced drastically.
“This is why we seek to expand our education policy to include senior secondary schools, and as soon as we can marginally increase our internally generated revenues, we will ensure that education is free and compulsory at the primary and secondary levels.”
El-Rufai reiterated that, the large number of school-aged children currently engaged in street hawking or begging and other inhumane practices is appalling at best and they were taking measures to arrest it. “We have enacted the Street Begging and Hawking (Prohibition) Law that will come into effect next month to ensure that every child above the age of six in Kaduna goes to school.
“We are pleased with the pilot of the adolescent girls’ initiative in Northern Nigeria spear-headed by the UNFPA and CIDA in response to improved safety for school girls, delayed marriage and female empowerment through access to education took off in Zaria.
“We thank the Government of Canada for their belief in the future of the adolescent Nigerian girl with the additional funding they are providing to scale-up the Adolescent Girl Initiative to an estimated reach of 9,250 more girls both here and in other Northern states,” El-Rufai said.
The programme also had in attendance, wives of the Governors of Kaduna, Kebbi, Taraba and Bauchi states who equally made public commitment to work towards promotion of girl child education in their respective states and Northern Nigeria.
