The Federal Government is inching closer to deliver its ambitious plan for financing safe schools across the country.
The initiative was consequent upon a series of attacks on at-risk schools especially in the northern part of the country during which hundreds of students were kidnapped by terrorists and bandits.
THE CONCLAVE reports that preparatory to the launch, the costed plan was on Tuesday, November 29, 2022, subjected to validation by all relevant stakeholders.
Critical Stakeholders that attended the validation meeting on Financing Safe Schools were the Federal Ministries of Education, Defence, Nigeria Police, Department of State Service (DSS), Civil Defence, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Human Rights Commission, Civil Socity Organisations (CSOs) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The chair of the Steering Committee of the Safe School Financing Programme, Dr Sanjo Faniran, who is a Director of Social Development at the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning (Planning Arm) confirmed at the end of the validation meeting that the costed plan for the Safe School Financing programme was ready for validation.
This was sequel to a review of the outcome of the validation by the Secretariat of the Safe School and the chair of the steering Committee, Dr Sanjo Faniran.
Recall that as part of proactive measures by the Federal Government of Nigeria, the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning had initiated the intervention programme tagged: “Safe School Financing programme”.
The programme addresses support to security of schools in all the crisis-ridden states in the county.
The objective of the programme is to scale up security in most at-risk schools across the country.
This had led to the setting up of an Inter-ministerial Committee of stakeholder Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) at the federal level that worked on a costed safe school finance plan since 2021.
The Committee, according to Dr Faniran, had since developed a robust Safe School Finance Plan with all relevant stakeholders.
“The plan has been subjected to a series of reviews with data collected across all the security-affected schools and states.”
Faniran said that the Federal Government had shown its commitment to ensuring that schools were safe and protected from attacks and conflicts by making adequate provisions in the 2023 budget for the implementing MDAs.
He stated that the intervention provisions were for relevant stakeholders to carry out their interventions in protecting education from attacks.
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