Bauchi Introduces Conditional Cash Transfer For Girl-child Education

As part of efforts and strategies to encourage girl child access to education, the Bauchi State government through the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE) will empower girls in junior and senior secondary schools with a conditional cash transfer of N5,000 and N10,000 respectively to complete secondary education.

LEADERSHIP gathered that 16,260 girls across Bauchi have been lined up to benefit from the scheme. To qualify for the initiative, each of the beneficiaries must have an average of 80 percent school attendance in a term.

Bauchi State AGILE focal person who is also the state commissioner for education, Dr Jamila Mohammed Dahiru disclosed this to reporters over the weekend during a breakfast round table with the media in her office.

She said the money will be paid to the beneficiaries every term in order to encourage them to always return to school until graduation.

The focal person added that digital education programmes in order to empower the girls with ICT skills to make them self-reliant and continue pursuing their educational dreams in tertiary institutions is also part of the mix.

Dr Jamila said AGILE project is aimed at doing things differently in order to achieve an improved education sector through effective and efficient learning processes in a conducive environment.

She stressed that the project is to give girl-child who have dropped out of school due to economic issues the chance to go back to school and complete the second stage of education.

Dr Jamila noted that under the schools’ expansion component, the project would see to the construction and renovation of 120 schools with furniture.

Dahiru who highlighted the importance of the reproductive and nutritional needs of the beneficiaries under the intervention, also emphasised that soft skills such as shoe making, tailoring, and catering among others would form part of the components.

She further disclosed that apart from 30 non-formal learning centres captured under its schools’ improvement grant and second chance education, stakeholders including parents, SBMCs and teachers would be trained to ensure proper implementation, monitoring, ownership and sustainability.

AGILE is a World Bank-Assisted project of the Federal Ministry of Education geared at improving secondary education opportunities for adolescent girls aged between 10 and 2.