We are providing care in the North despite security – UNFPA

How would UNFPA  deal with providing trauma care for the Chibok girls?The UN country team came up with a plan, because you have to do this thing holistically. There’s a whole community involved. The girls who have been abducted have mothers, sisters, and all that. We need to contact them to provide counseling and support, […]

How would UNFPA  deal with providing trauma care for the Chibok girls?
The UN country team came up with a plan, because you have to do this thing holistically. There’s a whole community involved. The girls who have been abducted have mothers, sisters, and all that. We need to contact them to provide counseling and support, particularly for the parents and siblings of those abducted. The second thing is that those abducted, some of them escaped and need special attention. Some of them would have been sexually violated, raped and could indeed have been infected with HIV or some other sexually transmitted infection and indeed become pregnant.
The girls will need emotional and psychosocial support to enable them overcome the trauma they have been subjected to. And reintegrating back into society also requires a systematic approach. The UN country team has put up a comprehensive plan—what I have just described is part of that plan—to make sure we can build the capacity of the communities to do that, because at the end of the day the sustainability of it is about that community to have people within it who can receive and offer support.
If I take a nurse from Abuja to that community, they won’t last. What we did was use University of Maiduguri to train people from the community who went back to the families to provide support.
But that’s within a larger context. There’s also the issue of food security in the entire region. You know that this has been going on for a while and everybody is so afraid that they are not farming. The Borno south  usually produces food for all of us but nobody is farming. The federal government has given some input, like grains, for farming. I think they just kept the grains. In a sense, we have a food security problem there and the UN country team is looking at ways to make sure that food security issue is looked at.
Then of course there is issue of movement of people. A humanitarian thing is developing. Very early on, when people leave their community, they just go to their relations in other communities. You do get a sense that people are moving in big numbers. Now it has come to a point where the UN is actually helping to set up camps. That wasn’t there before. And in the camps we now have to provide everyday things for people, including dignity kits for women and girls. And I think that also creates its own problems.  And I’m told there might have been an outbreak of cholera in one or two camps. There are many dimensions to the issue which the UN country team has put together a proposal and is implementing.
We would like to be more secure, for things to be more certain, but of course on a daily basis, there is still some fragility to the security situation in the north. And I think one of the lessons learnt is that we are not restricting ourselves to the three states where emergency was declared. Over the weekend there was movement down to Gombe. Gombe was not part of it before. So we are looking at the entire northeastern geopolitical zone to be able to respond to the humanitarian crisis.

For weeks, we have been hearing about demographic dividend, the window of opportunity it offers and how Nigeria can cash in on this. What exactly is this demographic dividend?
Nigeria has a population structure in which there are more young people who are not productive. There are children, young adults, who are in school or not in school or planning to go to school, and they don’t have any productive activity. And at the apex of that structure, you have people who have retired. So you have a very small narrow in-between of those who go to work every day, who are the productive force in the population. And when you take the numbers of those who are not productive—either young or old—against the numbers who are producing, you find that the numbers who are dependent on those who are productive is far larger than those who are productive. The dependency ratio is very high.
What we really want to do is harness the energy of those who are just growing up, give them education, skills, healthcare so that they can be more productive, but beyond that they can make different choices in their reproductive life.
Whereas today, the average Nigerian woman will have four, five, six children. You want to encourage people to have less. In which circumstance, this now growing population will choose to have three or two. In order for us to do that, we have to provide assistance. We may need some intervention technology—contraception, family planning. If you do that, what you are going to get is a large number of productive people who are going to have fewer children. And so you change the population structure. You are now going to have this large population who are producing, who will save, who would also ensure the economy is growing. And because of their reproductive behavior would actually have fewer children and dependency ratio will change.

It would then be right to say family planning is crucial to this, isn’t it?
One thing I must underscore is the education of the girl child. You must allow girls to go to school, allow them to stay in school, allow them to stay in school beyond 18. You also must give them access to information and services for reproductive health and for them to make choice, so they have children when they want to have children and they have the numbers they can afford.