As part of its efforts to empower young people through programming and mobilisation in its key areas of interventions; education, child protection, health, secure livelihood, W.A.S.H, sports for development, financial literacy, and human rights with strategic partnership, the Youth Empowerment Foundation (YEF), through its goal project held a three-in-one event; quiz competition, media forum and graduation ceremony for over 100 secondary schoolgirls in Ibadan.
The Goal project is a reproductive health, HIV/AIDS prevention, life skills, football and martial arts capacity building project among young people in selected secondary schools, which started in 2010 and it is being implemented in Lagos, Ibadan and Abuja FCT by the YEF, a youth-focused non-governmental and not-for-profit organisation, that has trained over 100,000 young girls on gender-based violence, life skills and human rights in since 2010 and has worked extensively in Ibadan for over 13 years.
The quiz competition which had various secondary schools from across Ibadan participating, featured topics which bordered on current affairs, child rights and protection, education and health. At the end of the competition, St Anne’s School II, Molete, Ibadan came first; United Missionary Comprehensive College, Molete Ibadan, came second while the Queen of Apostles, Oke Offa, Oluyoro, Ibadan came third.
Speaking on the focus of the project, the Executive Secretary of Youth Empowerment Foundation, Iwalola Akin Jimoh, said “the Goal Program is a programme we have been having in public secondary schools for over 12 years and what we do is to teach them life skills, leadership, financial literacy, hygiene and health and it’s a course we do for a period of about one year during which they go through four modules; be yourself, be money savvy, be healthy and enlightenment on their rights
“Basically what we want to do is to have a generation of girls that have gone through the training and are now playing it forward to teach other girls in their school or around them because we understand that we cannot reach all the girls. So girls under this scheme are peer leaders that reach out to other girls on all they have learnt. And now, we have 12 generations of girls that have passed through this.”
Speaking on the qualification criteria for the beneficiaries of the project, she said “there are two main criteria; their parents must consent that they should be part of the Goal project and they must be ready to reach out and teach other girls what they have learnt before they are selected to be a part of the goal program
“Goal program is implemented across three sites; Abuja, Lagos and Ibadan and for each of the centres, aside the national programmme we have a state programme that brings all the girls together.
The main purpose of this quiz competition is for the girls to meet themselves, interact with other girls from other schools going through the goal program and share lessons and we also use the quiz competition to have an idea of what they have learnt during the program.
“Some of the girls that came for the quiz programme are not part of the Goal program; we brought the others in to be part of the programme so they can also learn from the girls that are part of the programme. It’s a networking event to bring all the girls together for assessment and further learning. We use it as a tool to monitor and ensure that the girls can share what they already learnt,” she stated.
According to her, one of the key things that the foundation can say is that girls that have gone through the programme can go back to the secondary schools where they graduated to teach the girls what they were taught, adding that “we also have a sport angle to the project, the sports are meant to also teach lessons. You either choose football; which teaches team building, working together and time management or taekwondo where they learn about self defence. They have sports session every week.”
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