AGILE reviews adolescents life skills capacities’ manual

Adolescents Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE), a World Bank funded Project Plateau, has reviewed safe space training manual to build adolescents life skills capacities.

AGILE Director, Mrs Aisha Dadi, said that the efforts were to equip adolescents with requisite knowledge to face the challenges of life.

Dadi stated the intention was to help them to focus and not deviate from the goal and objective that they intended to achieve in life.

She said that the target might not be achieved without a training manual, a form of a curriculum or training manual on how to teach the adolescents each topic.

The director pointed out that to get a comprehensive training manual, AGILE brought together stakeholders across various ministries, departments and civil society organisations to review what Society for Family Health (SFH) has put together.

“The manual has four modules; Life skill, Health and Nutrition, climate change and Gender Based Violence (GBV) and we’re reviewing all the contents of the four modules.

“We want the modules to pass through the crucible of the stakeholders in the state that we can say that as Plateau, we have a manual that we are going to be using to build the capacities of in-school student of secondary schools.

“We’re going to be doing a training for the master trainers, the master trainers will use this document to step down to the facilitators who are the guidance counselors and female teachers in the schools.

“The guidance counselor or female teacher will in turn, step down this information to the children who are adolescent girls in schools,” she explained.

Dadi listed the stakeholders reviewing manual to include; permanent secretaries, directors, deputy directors and other staff from ministries of Education, Health, Women Affairs, Youth and Sports, Environment Finance and Civil Society organisations (CSOs) in the State.

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According to her, religious and traditional leaders are also available to look at the religious context of what was produced and how acceptable it would be under religious and traditional customs of the people.

She pointed out that AGILE would produce content that would be religiously and culturally acceptable in the State.

Mr Benjamin Gotan, Permanent Secretary, Plateau Ministry of Health described the exercise as educative and expository.

Gotan said that the participants had acquired a lot knowledge that would help make the lives of adolescent girls better.

The permanent secretary thanked the World Bank and Plateau government for keying into the project by paying their own counterpart funding for the programme.

AGILE Life Skill Lead in Plateau, Mrs Dinatu Dasat said that for the first phase, they were selecting 125 public schools in the 17 local governments of Plateau to participate.

Dasat said that the initiative became imperative because there was drop in the population of enrollment of girls in the secondary schools.

The team lead said that the 609 schools had been given grants to provide Water and Sanitation (WASH) facilities to make the schools comfortable for girls in terms of hygiene.

Mrs Jumai Madaki, a participant at the training, said that the main reasons for AGILE was to improve enrollment, re-enroll, retain and maintain girls in schools.

Madaki said that they had, during the training, identified some issues that were mitigating against achieving the goals.

“We’re going to work on the girl herself. Some girls do not go to school when they have menses, so this WASH facilities will be of immense help to them,” she said.

AGILE reviews adolescents life skills capacities’ manual