Seven States to benefit from World Bank’s $500m loan for girl-child education

The World Bank Board of Directors has approved a $500m credit from the International Development Association for the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment, to improve secondary education opportunities among girls in Kano, Kebbi, Kaduna, Katsina, Borno, Plateau and Ekiti. This was contained in a World Bank’s statement titled, “Nigeria to boost support for keeping adolescent girls in school.”

According to the World Bank, the Project tagged AGILE would use secondary school as a platform to empower girls through education, life skills, health education ( such as nutrition, reproductive health) GBV awareness and prevention, negotiations skills, self-agency and digital literacy skills.

It stated, “Poor condition of infrastructure and a lack of water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities makes it difficult for girls to stay in school. In addition, close to 80 per cent of poor households are in the north, which makes it very challenging for them to cover the direct and indirect costs of schooling. All these factors have contributed towards limiting the number of girls that have access to secondary school. If nothing is done, 1.3 million girls out of the 1.85 million who began primary school in 2017/2018 in the northern states will drop out before reaching the last year of junior secondary school.”

Speaking on the credit facility, the World Bank Country Director for Nigeria, Shubham Chaudhuri, said, “There is no better investment to accelerate Nigeria’s human capital development than to significantly boost girls’ education. “The AGILE project will enable Nigeria to make progress in improving access and quality of education for girls, especially in northern Nigeria. Addressing the key structural impediments in a comprehensive way will create the enabling environment to help Nigeria ensure better outcomes for girls, which will translate into their ability to contribute to productivity and better economic outcomes for themselves and the country.”

“This entails building more than 5,500 JSSs and 3,300 classrooms for SSSs, as well as improving 2,786 Junior Secondary and 1,914 Senior Secondary schools with safe, accessible, and inclusive infrastructure,”