By Rauf Oyewole
A 2023 report of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has revealed that the Safe School Initiative formulated to make school comfortable for learners has not yielded much positive results.
During a stakeholders meeting to disseminate the findings of the survey on how ten Northern states where the Safe School was implemented, the results showed that Kaduna, Zamfara, Sokoto, Adamawa performed poorly in 21 standards set for Safe School.
According to UNICEF, the ten states include; Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Borno, Yobe, Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kaduna and Kebbi.
Some of the indicators include, strong school system, violence against children, natural hazards, conflict, everyday hazards and safe school infrastructure.
The report says, the states on average implemented 9 out of the 21 standards. Overall, schools scored highest in their ability to prevent Violence Against Children (VAC), owing primarily to their capacity to respond to concerns about children's well-being and their implementation of activities intended to prevent VAC at school.
“On the other hand, the lowest score was in school infrastructure, which remains nonfunctional, unsafe, or inaccessible, while guidelines for access control at the school are seldom followed.
“Low performance was noted also in relation to everyday hazards, driven by schools' inability to meet children's nutrition, (Water Sanitation and Hygiene) WASH, and health needs. Little improvement, if any, was noted between data collection rounds, with scores remaining consistently low overall and across states,” the report stated.
The programme which was organised by the Bauchi State Universal Basic Education Board (BASUBEB) and UNICEF had 20 local government education secretaries from the 20 councils of the State in attendance.
While speaking in an interview at the programme, an Education Specialist with UNICEF, AbdulRahman Ibrahim Ado, urged the Bauchi State government to expedite action on infrastructure and WASH aspects of the Safe School Initiative to make school more comfortable for learners.
He said: “Another aspect is availability of WASH facilities, we have seen where girls are leaving school because of menstrual hygiene problems. When learners are comfortable with all these and there is no psychosocial and physical abuse whatsoever.”
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