70 per cent of girls in public schools are house-helps, says YEF

A study conducted by the Youth Empowerment Foundation (YEF) has revealed that 70 percent of girls that attend public schools are house-helps. The study conducted to ascertain why girls don’t participate in empowerment programmes said a major excuse given by the girls was that they are engaged at home with house chores by their caregivers, thereby preventing them from participating in the empowerment/extra-curriculum activities.
 
The Field Program Officer in Abuja, Adekemi Omole, said at a stakeholders meeting that the Goal Project sponsored by Standard Chartered Bank and currently running in three states –Abuja, Lagos and Ibadan – was aimed at training secondary schools girls on skills acquisition, financial literacy and coping with peer pressure among others.
 
Omole said so far, the foundation has trained over 100,000 girls in all the three states and aims to train 12,000 girls this year. “The project has also helped some of the girls who are victims or friends/relatives of victims to speak up and report their experiences. In recent times, YEF has handled many cases of early pregnancies and some of them are still pending in court. Some of the success stories so far are that there was no record of child pregnancy among Goal 2018 set and many ex-Goal girls were made prefects in their schools,” she said.