Follow Us on Google
From Priscilla Ediare, Ado-Ekiti
No fewer than 203 Ekiti public schools are to benefit from the $25 million School Improvement Grant (SIG) released by the World Bank to improve standard of education in the state.
Speaking at the flag off of the disbursement of the fund under the ‘World Bank Agile Project’ in Ado Ekiti, yesterday, the governor’s wife, Bisi Fayemi, said the initiative was geared towards boosting adolescent children’s access to education in Ekiti.
She explained that seven states had been listed to benefit from the scholastic programme, with Ekiti being the only beneficiary in the entire 17 states of the southern Nigeria.
She added that gone were the days when girls were being treated as people of no value, saying parents must begin to change their orientations and treat all genders with equal respect .
“Ekiti will receive $25 million that will be released for a period of five years. This project was not designed for any state in the South, it was designed for the North due to the ways cultural and religious hindrances are affecting the girl child there negatively.
“But when Governor Kayode Fayemi was lobbied by the World Bank to talk to his governor colleagues on the project concept, that was where he ensured that Ekiti’s name was also enlisted as a beneficiary.
“As the World Bank was talking to the northern governors, it knew quite well that all the issues and criteria they were talking about were already understood and being implemented in Ekiti and that was how the name of Ekiti State was considered worthy of being enlisted,” she said.
Fayemi revealed that Nigeria has a total of 13 million out-of-school children, regretting that 60 per cent of the victims were identified to be girls.
She said the staggering and mind-boggling statistics accounted for why she had consistently been advocating robust empowerment for girls and protection of their rights, particularly keeping them save in schools.
