100,000 to benefit from ARC-P in Gombe
By Auwal Ahmad
The Governor stated this during the official flag-off ceremony of the At-Risk Children (ARC-P) in Gombe on Monday.
He said the targeted children will be provided with necessary skills that would enable them to harness their potentials and energies for the overall development of the state.
“The government had keyed into the project including all existing social intervention programmes and tailored towards finding and implementing local solutions to address the menace of out-of-school children, reduce poverty and provide job opportunities to the 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”.
He said, nearly 70% of these children at risk are found in Northern Nigeria where the menace of the Almajiri system is widely practised and has become endemic adding that “available data estimates that there are about 13.2 million out-of-school children in Nigeria, equivalent to about 7% of the country’s entire population with 70 % of these children found in northern Nigeria”.
“In Gombe state, recent enumeration conducted by our administration through the Better Education and Service Delivery for All (BESDA) project estimated that there are over 700,000 out-of-school children spread across all the 11 local government areas quiet above the UNICEF estimated figure of about 550,000,” he said.