FG Inaugurates National Steering Committee For AGILE Project
Princess-Ekwi Ajide Abuja
The Federal Government of Nigeria has inaugurated a National Steering Committee for the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE) project to monitor and ensure the success of the project in Abuja, with additional 11 states on the project.
AGILE Project currently running in the country, is a World Bank-assisted project of the Federal Ministry of Education geared towards improving secondary education opportunities for adolescent girls aged between 10 and 20.
The Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman, while inaugurating the committee, said, girl child education is critical to reducing the high number of children currently out of school in Nigeria and urged the committee to ensure they deliver on the job as the funds expended is a loan.
He warned that the project would be strictly supervised as the benefits of a successful delivery would trickle down to every part of the country, especially the grassroots and charged state governments not to allow the project to have any form of handicap or suffer any challenges.
According to the Minister, the programme is at the heart of the federal government because it is part and parcel of out-of-school children hence a success in it, is a success for the federal government.
The Country Director of World Bank, Shubham Chaudhuri, said the project was designed to assist Nigeria invest in the girl child so she has the opportunity to grow and contribute to the development of her family, community and country at large.
The Minister of Youth Development, Dr. Jamila Ibrahim, was full of praises for the government for choosing a crop of committee members she said is a formidable team and urged them to collaborate to impact on the lives of youths in the country to expedite development.
Others who spoke on the occassion, include the Minister of State for Education, Dr. Yusuf Sununu, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Mr. David Adejo, and the AGILE Project Coordinator, Mrs. Amina Haruna, among others who gave varied success stories of the project and why it should be supported to ensure all factors leading to out of school for children especially girls in Nigeria are eliminated.
It will be recalled that the Federal Government and the World Bank recently committed additional monies to boost the 500 million dollars funding for the project to 2 billion euros.
