AS 25.6 PERCENT OF CHILDREN RISK HIGH LEVELS OF VIOLENCE, ABUSE, AND RECRUITMENT BY NON-STATE ARMED GROUPS
In Nigeria, 10.1 million primary-school-age children are not in formal schooling, while 60 percent of these estimated numbers are girls.
Making her one of the world’s highest number of out-of-school children.
But the federal government has continued to pay less attention to addressing these challenges, despite its devastating effect of nearly three times Under 5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) amounting to (142 per 1000) for children born by mothers with no education against children born in the richest households that account for (47 per 1000), while those born by mothers with tertiary education or higher accounts for (40 per 1000) respectively.
However, an estimated 25.6 percent of these Children which is 10.4 percent of the population risk high levels of violence and abuse, including recruitment by non-State armed groups, due to limited coverage of the government-funded social protection system, reaching only a fraction of the poor and vulnerable.
Even though they constitute half of the population in most developing countries, their vulnerability to poverty and abuse leaves a lasting mark on children’s development and mental health.
To this end, the United Nations Children’s Funds (UNICEF) Nigeria has been keen on achieving results more strategically, this, brought about the Training Of Trainers on the presentation of a new curriculum 2023 to 2027 for child rights reporting for polytechnics in Enugu state, where every child in Nigeria, especially the most excluded, survives, thrives, learns, protected and develops to full potential, free from poverty, in a safe and sustainable climate and environment.
This necessitated the gathering of scholars from the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Polytechnic lecturers, and the media to boost gender inequalities awareness as it endangers the girl child even as it identifies the government’s Insufficient investment while discouraging the basic social services financed by out-of-pocket expenditure by the most vulnerable in the society.
Fielding questions from journalists, UNICEF Communication specialist Geoffrey Njoku stressed that limited human resource capacity by states and local governments is responsible for the slow pace of service delivery, hence urging the media to do more investigation to balance investments that will promote public finance management to enable the curriculum to achieve success.
