Reaching out to orphans in Northern Nigeria

The consortium which is made up of organizations including Save the Children International (SCI), Management Sciences for Health (MSH), American International Health Alliance (AIHA), Association for Reproductive and Family Health (ARFH) and Mercy Corps have set a target of training 125,000 social workers to reach 575,000 orphans and vulnerable children in Kaduna, Sokoto, Kano, Plateau […]

The consortium which is made up of organizations including Save the Children International (SCI), Management Sciences for Health (MSH), American International Health Alliance (AIHA), Association for Reproductive and Family Health (ARFH) and Mercy Corps have set a target of training 125,000 social workers to reach 575,000 orphans and vulnerable children in Kaduna, Sokoto, Kano, Plateau and Bauchi States under the STEER project, which is a five years USAID funded project.
 This consortium organized a northern stakeholders meeting in Kaduna on Monday to deliberate on how to get approval for the use of Auxiliary Social Workers (ASW) curriculum developed by the STEER project in institutions that are offering social development in the five states.
At the meeting, the country director of AIHA, Justice Chukwudi Ulunta said the goal of the STEER project is to ensure that all orphans and vulnerable children access and utilize comprehensive and coordinated services and are able to realize their full rights. “It is also aimed at strengthening families by building caregivers’ capacity to serve as frontline care and support providers to children,” he said.  
The chief programme officer of National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), Abdul Kofarmata who also attended the meeting stated that the involvement of the board in the steer project is more or less in the area of training.
He said: “NBTE supervises institutions particularly polytechnics and other specialized institutions and most of the institutions present in this meeting run programmes in social development and social welfare at certificate, national diploma and higher national diploma level.
 “So, what we are trying to do is to institutionalize the curriculum. Already, NBTE developed ND and HND curriculum for the training of social workers, but this para-social work curriculum developed by the STEER project is aimed at massive training of grassroot social workers at community and local government level and this is where NBTE comes in because we want to institutionalize the curriculum into the institutions under the purview of the board so that the institutions that are running national diploma in social development can also run the certificate courses simultaneously. The duration of the course is nine months.”
 According to him, Nigeria, particularly the North has over the years been engulfed in so many communal and religious crises among others, which has rendered a lot of children and women vulnerable; thus, creating a teaming population of orphans, and widows but that the STEER project will help to identify the vulnerable children and their families as well as cater for them.
In her remark, the social welfare advisor for STEER project, Ruth Haruna reiterated that the project is sponsored by USAID and that it is specifically meant to identify households with vulnerable children and empower them.
 She said: “This time around, we are not giving out handouts, school fees or uniform to vulnerable children but we want to empower their care givers, we want to teach them how to catch the fish themselves. We also understand that there are volunteers at the grass root level that deliver services to vulnerable children but they don’t have the basic skills of social work principles; so the reason for the stakeholder’s meeting was set to see how the volunteers can be trained so that they can link the vulnerable children to the services available within the society and the community.
“The meeting was also set to ensure that the ASW curriculum is rich enough and that institutions that are offering social work adopt it as a certificate course so that it can be run in their institutions and these volunteers can be professionalized and the services they will deliver to vulnerable children will become of quality and of globally acceptable standard.
Commenting on the sustainability of the project, Ruth mentioned that the major strategy that will bring about sustainability is working with the government. “The government is there to stay, it goes no where. Therefore, we work with the States Ministry of Women Affairs, the Department of Child and Social Welfare, the local government officers that are in charge of social welfare. So, these officers will be trained on the project, their capacity will be built. There are officers within the Ministry of Women affairs that are staff of STEER project who are residing there,”
“What they will do is to identify the gaps that are within the structures and then build a workplan so that together with STEER project we will work on this system and strengthen it so that after the project closes, we will leave these children with the government,” she explained.
In the same vein, she noted that some gaps have been identified with the almajarai system in the North, saying that they are looking at the possibility of having the Mallams that are taking care of the children become caregivers. “They will be empowered and trained to ensure that these resources trickle down to the vulnerable children,” she added.