Maid Strong: Stop Trafficking of Adolescent Girls

Our Centre is located in an underserved area in the sense that the children receive third rate education and most graduate from high school almost illiterate. The result is that the girls in the area spend years trying to pass the high school certificate exam and the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board exam designed for entry into the university. They also have no skills. Therefore, they just roam the area jobless and vulnerable to trafficking or being recruited into the baby factory nefarious industry in which girls are paid to become pregnant, have a baby and sell to the industry. This is the syndrome we have been trying to check in our Maid Strong project.

First, we have been training the girls in various marketable skills. However, the serious handicap for those who became pregnant without finishing school or getting married is finding a place to leave their children while they are working to earn a living. Hence, in September 2021, we started a school that carters for creche, kindergarten, primary, and secondary schools. We charge minimal tuition while we engage top notch teachers at salary above that paid by other schools which give inadequate education because they focus on profit.

However, making sure we give quality education to our participants comes with a high cost: we are in constant struggle to make payroll. We need serious financial help. We have incredible teachers who adopt the tenet of friendly school where students are made to feel that their classrooms are a place to feel free, happy, and cared for. Our mantra is that since we do not know the conditions of the students’ homes, we must provide an ideal home away from home for all the students.

Since September 27, 2021 that the school started, we have been able to raise the performances of the senior secondary student from below 60% to 70% in chemistry, mathematics and physics, English Biology and many other subjects and we believe that before the end of academic year their performances would have been increased to above 90 percent in each of the subjects.

Our school motto is “Eye to the Future.” Our school Slogan is “Only the best is Good Enough.” As computer knowledge is the vehicle of success in this century and probably in the future centuries, in the secondary section, we pay serious attention to computer skills-- teaching students between age 14-17 basics of programming with the help of code combat. Code combat is a coding game for kids that teach Python and JavaScript coding using text-based programming. Kids get to play through different levels of an RPG (role-playing game) and, along the way, they will learn to code in Python and JavaScript. Courses.

We also teach Artificial intelligence and embedded system: teaching the basics of artificial intelligence and embedded systems using an Arduino IDE and Arduino microcontroller and teaching how to draw and troubleshoot electrical circuits using proteus.

In the primary section, we make sure the students and the teachers acquire modern and useable knowledge of computer. So far, we are sure that every child in the primary section can

• Identify the parts of a computer and its functions
• Use a computer (know computer safety and computer maintenance)
• Set up a desktop computer (from connection of power cables to connection of optical cables, mouse and keyboard)
• Identify a keyboard (hardware and screen keyboard ) and state the functions of the keys on the keyboard
• Type effectively, this keys (a, s, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, ;, t, u, v, n,) without looking at the keyboard
• Properly shut down of a laptop, knowing when to sleep a laptop and when to hibernate it.
• Check up for information on the internet, download pictures etc.
• Copy and paste files on the desktop screen.
• Eject files properly from the computer
• Read the instruction on the computer screen, understand the pop up instruction before clicking ( cancel or OK )
• Different the various types of files extensions ( exe, pdf, jpg, png etc)
• Create folders on the laptop

We do not stop here; we make sure that the students have something new to teach their parents and guardians every day they are back from school!

 As our practice has been since 2008, we not only impart academic knowledge, we broaden the horizon of our students and their caregivers through symposium. In January 2022, we held a symposium on the theme of “Changing mindset: Changing Lives.” We had three terrific presenters. A  seasoned educator presented on “The Human Mind: The Fountain of All Possibilities. A strong motivator and public speaker who has a huge following on the social media, presented on “Mindset: The Key to Unlocking Potentials. An alumnus of Inwelle Centre Skills and academic training 2017, who is now a student Human Rights activist, presented on a very live and burning topic in the Nigerian milieu, “Is School Really a Scam?” See photos.

In January also, we had a skill training for young girls to learn how to make smoothie and start their own smoothie business.

Links:

• School Children at the playground
• School Children Repairing Computers

The Work We Did

At all our centres, after school tutoring is on-going Tuesday through Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Satellite Centres are keeping it real with tutoring school children.

We keep on keeping it real at Inwelle Centre as we promote economic empowerment.August 7, 2021: It was the turn of our Inwelle Centre Enugu participants to be trained on skills to enable them increase their source of income. The training of Women at Inwelle Centre Amorji Nike Enugu went well. They made bar soap, disinfectant, and the bleach during the two-day project.

Economic Empowerment of Women and Young Girls Through Skills Acquisition

Our ongoing skill acquisition programme is to teach women (especially mother's) on how to produce household cleaning products with the aim of reducing high poverty rate among women in our community How? When they acquire the knowledge of producing disinfectant, liquid soap, bar soap and bleach, they can be self-employed and also save money used in buying those products at the market. For example a liter of hypo bleach in the market is N800 whereas N900 can be used to produce 10 litres of bleach. Also the aim is to control the spread of germs, bacteria, found at homes, schools, markets etc and reduction of diseases and infections that are common in women and children.

Just like at the training at Ogidi Satellite Centre, Idemili North Local Government Area, Anambra State, the participants at Amorji Nike Centre, Enugu East Local Government Area, Enugu State, were educated on the need for safety wears and measure, when dealing with caustic soda and other harmful chemicals. We made sure that they understood the seriousness of adequate protection while handling chemicals. They were shown the picture of result of careless handling of the chemicals for production and were also shown some safety wears, such as nose guards, hand gloves, lab coat etc.

They were taught how to produce disinfectant, which is important for use because it prevents skin diseases and kills germs when used for bathing and cleaning surfaces and floors.

Our next training will be for Women and young girls at Inwelle Satellite Centre, Ozalla Ezimo, Udenu Local Government Area, Enugu State.

September:

 Inwelle International Academy of Excellence opened on Monday, September 27, 2021. It is not a full house yet, but we are making progress. We are teaching classes from Kindergarten to Junior Secondary level. We are teaching all the academic subjects as well as skills acquisition. The idea is to give the young people in our school the skills earn money as they go to school. This way, they take care of their personal need.

 Inwelle International Academy of Excellence is keeping it real with not only classroom teaching but also making sure that both the teachers and the students are computer literate.

Links:

• Economic Empowerment Skills Acquisition Class in Progress

May to July 2021:

Summary

Inwelle Centre Maid Strong Project continues to wax stronger and stronger in spite of lack of funds.

Since May 2021, we have

• tutored  indigent girls in Mathematics, Sciences, and Computer literacy;
• assisted our Miad Strong teenage single mothers in acquiring marketable skills and returning to school, taking  school exams that have the potential to raise  their monthly earning from $30.00 to $100.00;
• worked diligently to change mindsets of under-aged single mothers from becoming baby factories and rehabilitating and uniting them with their families;
• continued to provide health care information, face masks, school materials, and access to clean water to help in hygiene and sanitation;
• started the process of registering an academy for the indigent; and
• started a women’s progressing project to build the capacity of rural women to keep their young daughters at home, instead of trafficking them to the city centers where they are sexually exploited and where they face untold sexual and physical violence.

Access to Clean Water

We reported last quarter that our water pump sumo was vandalized and stolen. Being very much aware that combating the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates that people wash hands more frequently than before and that water supply is absolutely necessary, we made making our bore hole functionable again. We were able to replace our solar sumo pump through tasking ourselves to provide the N450,000.00 required to buy a new pump. We now have water. The village has water as well. The photos below show the new installations

Tutoring:

We continued to tutor young people, especially young girls at our satellite centres. See photos.

As we continue to tutor indigent girls, we continue to see the need for providing quality education that will level the field for these girls and curb the system that makes them graduate almost illiterates. Our biggest achievement this quarter is setting the establishing of Inwelle Centre International Academy for Girls in Motion. See our logo.

Fortifying the women to empower the Maid Strong Girls

We started by teaching our adult education women  rudimentary things – adult education and healthcare information. We have been teaching them arithmetic—addition, subtraction, multiplication-- to make them literate, we taught them how to write simple sentences, their names, for even though they can speak pidgin English, some of them have never written much. We also taught them the rudiments of event hosting/catering. We have taught them how to make bar and liquid soap, disinfectant, and bleach. The make these in small scale and sell to their neighbours.  Presently, our strategy is to scale up their skill level and guide them to form a formidable team, capable of becoming a moving force in the economic life of the community and other communities bothering the town. Hence we are guiding them to start a cooperative.

Activities:

1. Twenty-five women comprising widows, single mothers, and survivors of violence against women are being organized and trained to start and register a cooperative, form a leadership structure, open an account, market their products and pay themselves salaries.
2. By August ending, they will be trained in serious skills that will enable them generate income.
3. We have hired a business expert to teach the women the skills needed to market, distribute, keep proper accounting method and advertise their product.
4. Ten of the women will learn how to make soap, disinfectant, bleach, sanitizer and other products needed to keep good hygiene and to combat such pandemic as; Ten women will learn bakery, event hosting and event decoration; while Five women will learn the administrative, marketing, and account keeping for the cooperative. Once the cooperative starts running, the women will teach each other their area of capacity. In the end, all the women will know how to function in each of the areas.
5. We will Purchase equipment for baking, event hosting, and event decoration.

This report period saw great success and one one sadness. Below is the report for this below.

In December 2020, Inwelle Study and Resource Satellite Centre at Ogidi patnered with Odida Ogidi youths to host a Jamboree during which boys and girls showcased their talents. It was an evening of dancing an joy. 

From January to March 2021, the Centre continued to run after school tutoring and to have the library open to the public. That meant that we had to purchase more face masks as we insisted that users of the centre must be properly masked. 

In March, Inwelle Centre Adult Education group were taught  Catering, event hosting, and event decoration during the International Women’s Day 2021 Entrepreneurship Workshop.

In  March 2021, Inwelle Centre had a bit of  sad and disturbing news. In the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, Inwelle Centre provided a solar-powered source of water bore hole at Odida Ogidi. We posted the photo in jubilation that this source of water supply will help in the fight against the virus as people can now fetch water for their daily needs. Sadly, March 17 morning, we discovered that someone or some people have vandalized the bore hole and stolen the solar powered sumo water pumping machine installed. This pumping machine cost us N450,000.00 to purchase last year. Who knows how much it will cost now that the cost of everything is hitting the roof?  We wre really sad. 

They Did It!!!  Inwelle Centre Odida Ogidi Adult Education group  Skills Acquisition participants were trained from March 25 to 26, 2021to make soap, disinfectant, and  bleach. The skill acquisition programme at INWELLE SATELLITE CENTRE ODIDA OGIDI is to teach women (especially mother's) on how to produce household cleaning products with the aim of reducing high poverty rate among women in that rural area (ODIDA OGIDI). How? When they acquire the knowledge of producing disinfectant, liquid soap, bar soap and bleach, they can be self-employed and also save money used in buying those products at the market. For example, a liter of hypo bleach in the market is N800 whereas N900 can be used to produce 10 liters of bleach. Also the aim is to control the spread of germs, bacteria, found at homes, schools, markets etc and reduction of diseases and infections that are common in women and children.

 The women were educated on the need for safety wears and measure, when dealing with caustic soda and other harmful chemicals. We made sure that they understood the seriousness of adequate protection while handling chemicals. They were shown the picture of result of careless handling of the chemicals for production and were also shown some safety wears, such as nose guards, hand gloves, lab coat etc.

Since we started teaching young girls and women on production of household products in all our other centres, we have never been so fulfilled and happy the way we were when we taught ODIDA OGIDI women.

 Reasons

1)we saw in them the zeal and eagerness to learn in other to be self-employed.

2)most of the participants are young mother's and single mothers that really need those cleaning products for their families and children's proper hygiene.

3) the majority of them are unemployed because they are in rural area and some are nursing mothers.

4) they can now produce and sell the product to earn money for themselves.

We were so encouraged by their enthusiasm that we are planning how to help them form a cooperative so that they can start producing in big quantities and selling.This way, they become empowered to resist the enticement that makes them allow the trafficking of their young daughters or tacitly encouraging their daughters to prostitute themselves or engage in transactional sex or become baby factories. Through this cooperative, these women comprising widows, single mothers, and survivors of violence against women will be organized and trained to establish and register a cooperative, form a leadership structure, open an account, market their products and pay themselves salaries.

Links:

• Skills Acquisition Training Session
• Skills Acquisition Training Session
• Skills Acquisition Training Session Participant Talking

We have continued to tutor young people, especially girls at our centre. We still supplied masks to particpants. Thanks to our youth corps members. Kudos to these Inwelle Centre amazing Corpers. Inwelle Centre beneficiaries can not stop talking about their good work at the Centre. Odida Ogidi  stakeholdersappreciates the tremendous work they did while serving at Inwelle Centre. One of the youth copers writes on Facebook

Inwelle Centre Ogidi now has solar powered water Borehole. Yeh!!! Thanks to our Executive Director, who sponsored this project from her summer teaching salary. We need water if we have to beat this COVID-19 pandemic by washing hands constantly to maintain hygiene.  In the face of hunger, adding buying of water to the mix of the demands on family finances can cause people to wash hands less times than is demanded.  Also, girls in indigent families are saddled with the burden of going to distant places to fetch water. We have put the cost of buying water and the burden of fetching water to rest. Anyone in the community can get water free from Inwelle Centre. Yeh!!! Again.

We shipped our 40ft container of teaching and reading materials, 30 Computers, chairs and tables, building materials for our proposed girls’ academy. Hopefully, the containing will arrive in Nigeria on or about December 25. Then we will face the burden of clearing the container and transporting the goods to Enugu, Inwelle Centre headquarter. We are right now appealingto friends and family for the fund to make this happen. We are optimistic that as usual, they will come to our rescue.

Links:

• One of corpers posted his work at Inwelle Centre on facebook