By Aisha Gambo

The Reaching Out-of-School Children (ROOSC) project, an initiative of the Kaduna State Ministry of Education, has taken its ‘Back-To-School campaign’ to Unguwan Shanu, Kaduna North LGA.

The campaign, which was inaugurated on Tuesday, is aimed at sensitising communities to ROOSC project, while encouraging parents and caregivers to return their children back to school.

The campaign team, which included stakeholders from the ministry, development partners, religious organisations and the media, began with a courtesy visit to the Village Head of Unguwan Shanu.

While speaking, the Project Coordinator, Project Monitoring Unit, ROOSC, Mr Ezra Angai, stated that it was an intervention designed to make quality education inclusive and accessible to all children.

“As part of the project, 102 new schools will be built and 170 existing ones including learning centres will be renovated.

“A key feature of the campaign is the Catch-Up Programme, a nine-month remedial education initiative aimed at children who have never been enrolled or who dropped out of school.

“It offers foundational literacy, numeracy, and life skills to help reintegrate these children into mainstream education or vocational training,” he said.

Similarly, the ROOSC Project Director, Save the Children, Mbursa Emmanuel, commended the community leaders for their support, saying that they were key to ensuring the success of the project.

Emmanuel stated that livelihood support for families, a key barrier to school attendance, was not covered under the project, adding that discussions were ongoing with the government and partners to explore solutions.

Kabir Lawal, Director of the Social Mobilisation Department at the State Universal Basic Education Board, said that the campaign would be a recurring activity embedded in the state’s education budget.

“In our annual budget, we have made provisions for this type of campaign, and it will now be conducted at the beginning of every academic session.

“Beyond this, we are training School-Based Management Committees (SBMCs) and deploying Social Mobilisation Officers to intensify grassroots advocacy across communities,” Lawal said.

In his address, the Village Head of Unguwan Shanu, Alhaji Nura Ibrahim, commended government’s efforts in ensuring that out-of-school children were returned back to school.

He also urged the government to take more decisive actions against poverty, saying that it was one of the root causes of educational exclusion.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the ROOSC project was initiated by the Kaduna State Government under its Ministry of Education, with Save the Children and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as the implementing partners.

The project targets 200,000 out-of-school children while supporting the teachers and learners with 500,000 teaching and learning materials. (NAN)(www.nannews.ng)

Edited by Ifeyinwa Okonkwo/Bashir Rabe Mani