As early as 7:00 am, children from Oshodi/Isolo and its environs began to troop in their to the Shogunle Human Rights office, the venue of Out of School Children Empowerment Foundation (OSCEF) third Christmas and end of year party.
Welcoming the children to the party, the Chairman/Executive Director of OSCEF, Kelani Akeem Tolu, said the NGO has given it a matter of priority to celebrate with children at every Christmas and encourage them on the need for qualitative education.
He noted that government alone cannot solve the challenge of out of school children in Nigeria that had recently increased from 10.5million to 13.2million, thus making the country with the highest number of out of school children in the world.
Kelani therefore, called on government to identify some NGOs in Nigeria who have passion to work along with them (government) to put the rising challenge under a check, saying insurgency and terrorism the country is contending with today are products of out of school.
He said OSCEF had been able to enrol over 2000 children back to school since its inception in 2008, he tasked government to do more beyond school feeding programme initiated by the current administration.
He said though he supports the school feeding initiative to an extent because it has achieved the aims of taking children from the streets to school but according to him, the sustainability of the scheme lies in the hands of NGOs and parents who can ensure full monitoring.
Speaking on the current alarming figure of out of school children that had increased from 10.5million to 13.2million in recent times, Kelani traced the challenge to the activities of insurgency in the northern part of Nigeria and failure of successive administrations in Nigeria to heed the recommendations of UNESCO on devoting 37 percent of yearly budgetary allocation to education sector.
As part of solutions to make Nigeria to come out from her position as a country that harbours the highest number of out of school children in the world, the OSCEF director urged government through Universal Basic Education Board to remodify their programme on which a child cannot be enrolled in school beyond first term of a new session.
A social worker and staff of the NGO, Oluwaseyi Motunrayo Ariyoh, said searching for those children is challenging but though an interesting activity. According to her, they go out with lots of goodies and gift items to make the children happy in order to extract good and genuine information from them.
She recalled that she was once assaulted by a tout at Alhaja Mogaji Mogaji market at Oshodi but for the timely intervention of some police officers.
“We saw some underage girls who are suppose to be in the school and one guy emerged from nowhere and threatened to beat us that we don’t have any right to come and question those girls. But we later discovered that the man was using them to hawk and sell in his shop. So I hinted my boss and he called on the police who came to our rescue.”
Giving her own testimony, an SS1 student, Taiye Sulaiman, who happened to be an out of school child before OSCEF enrolled her back to school, commended the organisation for giving her hope after a long time of staying away from school.
She encouraged her contemporaries who were enrolled in schools by the organisation to make judicious use of the rare opportunity and become useful for themselves and the nation.
Isaac David from Kaduna State who wants to become an engineer in future, also gave kudos to OSCEF for picking him from the street and illuminated hope and aspiration for his dream.
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