The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Monday that it is delivering a customized learning programme to over 300,000 children and youths in Nigeria’s turbulent northeast pushed out of their villages and schools as a result of terrorist assaults.
At a press conference organized by the Borno state government in collaboration with UNICEF, Paola Ripamonti, UNICEF education manager at its Maiduguri Field Office, said the European Union-backed programme was aimed at returning children and youths to school through formal and informal education after being absent from the classroom for nearly a decade.
See also Nigeria gets 1st monkeypox death in 2022
20104 out-of-school children (53 percent females) now have access to informal learning sessions, while 16,630 children (52 percent girls) have moved into the official education system, according to Ripamonti.
She said that the EU-funded Response, Recovery, and Resilience initiative is also assisting children and teenagers who have been victims of terrorism with psychosocial assistance and training.
According to a UNICEF estimate, three million people have displaced in the country’s northeast since the terrorist assaults began in 2009, and more than 800,000 children have driven out of classrooms as a result of the violence.
The children reside in refugee camps with their parents or guardians in neighboring nations Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, while others live in IDP camps in the region, where they get schooling through a UNICEF and other international partners’ education programme.
