The American University of Nigeria has re-inaugurated its Feed and Read programme, which provides literacy skills to over 24,000 out-of-school children in the North East at the height of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2014.
The re-launch took off with the enrolment of a 100 out-of-school children, comprising of 50 Almajiri boys and 50 girls, who have been out of school.
The program was marked with the inauguration of the Global Center for out-of-school children, which the institution stated had the main objective of eradicating the out-of-school phenomenon globally.
The institution also decried humanitarian funding to the educational sector in emergencies and lack of attention to the issue of out-of-school children.
Dr. Margee Ensign, who led other faculty and staff members of the institution, to inaugurate the Global Center, said, it was for that reason, the American University of Nigeria, was establishing the center to address school drop-outs.
She lamented that no institution in the world has made the out-of-school children issue a very “big issue”.
Dean Post Graduate Studies of the institution, Dr. Jacob Jacob, said educational funding accounted for only two percent of global humanitarian funding, adding that through the center, it hoped to leverage on research that would influence policy both at the local and global levels to address the challenge of the out-of-school phenomenon.
Punch
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