Unless urgent actions are taken by the federal government, development partners among other stakeholders Nigeria may not be able to achieve the goal of curtailing preventable deaths among children, achieving education for all among other targets by 2030, Save the Children International has stated.

The Chief Impact Officer, SCI Mr. Ebrima Saidy, during a press conference yesterday in Abuja after his visit to the North East, stated that from available data, it was obvious that Nigeria cannot achieve these ambitions for children by 2030, because it was critically way behind in achieving the targets, “and Nigeria is one of the countries where we need to raise the bar to achieve those ambitions for children.”

He added that the three main ambitions of the organization to make sure that by 2030, no child dies from preventable causes before their fifth birthday; that children from every part of the country are able to access good, quality education regardless of their geographical location and also, to ensure that violence against children is no longer tolerated anywhere in the world.

Saidy however maintained that to achieve these targets, things must be done differently, as year 2030 is by the corner. He maintained that to achieve the target, development partners as well as government cannot continue to do things the way they are doing.

He called for more investments as well as synergy to achieve children’s rights and Sustainable Development Goals, especially as they relate to children in Nigeria.

Stating that the organization has been providing life-saving humanitarian assistance and responding to emergencies, Saidy revealed that in 2022, SCI’s programme reached more than 24.4 million children and families in over 70 Local Government Areas in 17 States of the federation and since January 2023, SCI has reached out to more than 1,590,047 individuals, comprising 64 per cent children.

While mentioning that he was very impressed with the success rate of projects impacting children when he visited some of the places in the North East, Nigeria, he stated that one of the stabilization centres where children suffering from severe and acute malnutrition were being treated, has an average success rate of 94 to 95 per cent.

Saidy added that there were a lot of SDGs indicators that would be achieved such as access to education. “But, with the indicators around quality of education, we may not be able to achieve that by the year 2030 and that is not just in Nigeria, but also in many countries around the world.

“This is because the quality of instruction, the resourcing of schools, the resourcing of teachers, enabling environment for teachers to provide good quality education, the infrastructure that is required. We are still way behind on a number of these.”

Saidy held that the case was similar in the health sector, which he said, was strong in some states but relatively weak in others. “So, we are not quite there.

“We are committed to the SDGs. We know from the data where we are doing well and where we are not doing well. I think the right thing to do is to identify the areas that we are not doing very well and increase government investment in those areas, and coordinate the work of NGOs the work of the development partners, to say everybody all hands on deck.”

According to Saidy, working together under the coordination of the government would make it possible to make significant strides to get close to the SCI target as possible by the year 2030

“It is not late for us. We are still optimistic that we may not achieve all but we can still push the boundaries as best as possible. Yet, we have to partner to work better together.

“We have to complement each other. We all bring different expertise and different roles and responsibilities; it is about including the children and the communities that we work in. We need to work better with government. We need to work better with donors and our development partners.

“We want to be able to raise more funding to be able to increase the amount of states that we work in, but also the depth of our work in some of the states that are very, very deprived”, he said.

Saidy noted that Nigeria contributed one of the largest number of early child and forced marriages and out- school children to the global caseload.

According to him, all the children deserved a better future and as such, the rights of children should be fully protected and fulfilled.

This he said, is through the creation and adoption of suitable policies, strategies, plans and making sure that those frameworks are budgeted for and implemented to transform children’s lives.