The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), says it will pririotise community engagement to achieve sustainable outcomes and decision-making processes in Jigawa.
The UN agency said that it would undertake strategic repositioning towards encouraging community engagement, in view of the existing local government autonomy.
Rahman Farrah, Chief of UNICEF, Kano Field Office, said this on the sidelines of the 2024 year review meeting, in Dutse on Tuesday.
Represented by Micheal Banda, Officer in charge of Kano Office, UNICEF, Farrah said the shift was necessary in view of the changes in its interventions between 2022 and 2024 in the state.
“We have made a tremendous progress in all the sectors, for example in education. We reduced the high number of out-of-school children, we made progress in open defacation campaign in local government areas.
“We also made progress in nutrition, health, child protection, birth registration and poverty reduction through cash transfer under the social policy programmes,” he said.
He said the review meeting achieved three things, namely taking stock of the achievments in the previous year, taking care of all the changes that occurred in the environment.
This, he said, assisted in identifying priorities and bottlenecks impeding the rights for children.
According to him, UNICEF will focus on ODF campaign in communities, and reduce the number of out-of-school children, immunisation and maternal mortality rate.
“We also want to focus on upscaling groups birth registration as part of the child protection programme. In social policy, there is a big divide in terms of poor children, who are at risk of missing out on opportunities.
“UNICEF will focus on those children at the risk of missing out on health and education because of poverty, through conditional cash transfer, we will reach out to every child,” he said.
He lauded the state governor, Umar Namadi for his commitments and increased budgetary allocation to education and the social sector. (NAN)
