Mercy Corps, NYSC educates 21,000 girls from poor homes

Mercy Corps, NYSC educates 21,000 girls from poor homes
NAN-H-36
Education
By Yashim Katurak
Abuja, Feb. 19, 2018 (NAN) Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian organisation, says it has provided educational training to over 21,000 girls from poor homes in two years.
Mrs Shweta Shah, the Programme Manager, Mercy Corps, said this when a delegation of the corps visited the NYSC Director-General, Brig.-Gen. Suleiman Kazaure, at the schemes Headquarters in Abuja on Monday.
Shah said that the training was conducted in collaboration with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in Kaduna, Lagos and Kano states as well as FCT under the ‘Educating Nigerian Girls on New Enterprise (ENGINE)’ programme.
She said that the programme, which held from October 2015 to April 2017, focused on providing educative training to girls who had dropped out of school.
According to her, the training also covered girls who could not afford to pay their schools fees, those who were pregnant and girls who were divorced.
She said that the training was designed to raise awareness on education and improving the learning outcome of girls, saying English Language and Mathematics were taught among other subjects.
“We are here today to tell you that the first phase of this programme, ‘ENGINE 1’ was a success. We trained a total of 21,762 girls and we have commenced the second phase ‘ENGINE 2’.
“We hope to design an MoU with the NYSC for the phase two of the programme as we want our collaboration to continue.
“In the same month that the first phase ended, that is April 2017, we started phase two and we are still going to work with the same set of girls.
“We initiated ENGINE 2 because in the course of carrying out ENGINE 1, we observed that the girls face so many barriers as an individual and we need to come together to address this.
“We want to improve the learning outcomes and without the support of the government and community members we are not going to achieve that. This is why we are partnering with the NYSC.
“There are so many things an educated girl can achieve which includes starting up a profitable business, further her education, join vocation training institutes and join the work force.
“The focus on ENGINE 2 is transforming the lives of marginalised girls; improve their learning outcomes so that they can have a bright future,” Shah said.
She said that the corps collaboration with the NYSC was to train the schemes schedule officer on the ENGINE Methodology; which was to raise awareness on education and improving the learning outcomes of the girls.
Shah explained that these officers are then deployed to the states to train the girls adding that its collaboration with the NYSC was a strategy to help the country sustain the programme.
She said: “This is because the programme is for Nigerians and owned by Nigeria.’’
Kazaure assured the corps of its readiness to always partner, saying the scheme will provide all the necessary support needed to continue the programme.
Mercy Corps is empowering people to recover from crisis, build better lives and transform their communities for good. (NAN)
KRY/MST
Edited by Muhammad Suleiman Tola