From Isaac Anumihe, Abuja
The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) and Transparency International (TI) have disclosed that more than 50 per cent of girls are not attending school at the basic education level and 1,000,000 girls drop out of school between the first and last year of primary school.
Speaking at the Population Conversation seminar organised by Population Matters in partnership with CISLAC and Transparency International (TI), Head of TI in Nigeria and Executive Director, CISLAC, Auwal Ibrahim Musa noted that Nigeria’s population is projected at 400 million in 2050 and Nigeria has a record of 20 million out-of-school children. This is as about 53.40 per cent of youths are unemployed.
“The rate of out-of-school children exposes the nation to most of the social crimes perpetrated by youths including the accelerated level of prostitution, armed robbery, rape and all facets of violence.
To this effect, Musa advocated a reduction in birth rate regretting that Nigeria is among the top five countries in the world with the highest under-five mortality rates.
“In addition to the general leading causes of under-five mortality, studies have highlighted the survival probabilities, the impact of socio-economic, demographic and environmental factors as major threats to the survival of under-five mortality in Nigeria,” he said.
“Given this background, we cannot deny the fact that the time has come for Nigerians to begin to embrace the idea of smaller family to boycott ravaging poverty, youth unemployment, child mortality and other socio-economic upheavals. As a result, the Nigeria Population Conversation project is necessitated by the need to engender people-oriented participation and harvest perception on population to shape policy direction for well-informed national planning to achieve the overall demographic advantage for sustainable development,” TI explained.
Furthermore, CISLAC observed that the greatest challenge to population is illiteracy as most Nigerians don’t know the impacts of it on their well-being.
“More importantly, wide gap has been observed in population literacy at individual levels; and this poses further challenges to demographic accountability, as the main stakeholders in Nigeria Population Conversation. It is worthy of note that active participation by Nigerians across the six geo-political zones in the Population Perception Survey report is a clear indication of citizens’ readiness for constructive conversation on population and its impacts on their well-being as well as living standards,” TI, said.