3.9m girls enrolled in school under AGILE, says Fed Govt

The Federal Government has said it enrolled 3.9 million girls in secondary schools across 18 states under the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE) project.

The AGILE National Project Coordinator Amina Haruna said this at the re-launch of the initiative with the theme: Madubi: Empowering Girls, Transforming Communities.

Haruna said 1 million girls had graduated from life skills and digital literacy acquisition training under the AGILE programme.

The AGILE initiative is a $1.2 billion World Bank flagship programme targeted at addressing the multifaceted barriers faced by girls, particularly in marginalised and underserved communities in completing their secondary education.

The project is implemented by the Federal Ministry of Education in Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Jigawa, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe, Zamfara, Borno, Ekiti, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, and Plateau states.

She said: “I am proud to share that under this project, we have increased enrolment, retention and completion over the three and a half years of implementation with 3.9 million girls in secondary schools.

“We have constructed and completed over 200 Junior (JSS) and Senior Secondary Schools (SSS), renovated 8,800 WASH/toilet facilities with boreholes and solar facilities.

“More than 460,949 pieces of furniture have been provided. AGILE has recruited and deployed 16,232 teachers with 50 per cent of these figures being females.

“Over 53,491 teaching and learning materials were also provided to schools for effective and efficient teaching and learning.”

Haruna also said schools under AGILE intervention had developed entrepreneurial skills by setting up small scale businesses in the forms of fish ponds and livestock, as part of climate change to generate income for them.

The Minister of State for Education, Prof. Suwaiba Ahmed, said the government would soon unveil a new initiative, called LUMINA, to target the provision of education and vocational training opportunities for girls in hard-to-reach locations.

She said there was a need to ensure that girls in such locations were provided effective educated.

The minister, who maintained that every child deserves a chance to dream, stressed that it was important for the government to support the girls to actualise their dreams by ensuring increased enrolment, as well as retention and completion of adolescent girls’ education.

Ahmed urged stakeholders to continue to challenge the barriers that stand against girls’ education while creating a country where all girls could have their dreams realised in the new millennium.