Thousands of war-affected adolescent girls live in IDP camps in northeastern Nigeria. Many of them have been traumatized by violence and enslavement by Boko Haram and other violent insurgent groups, often becoming child-mothers while in captivity. ChildVoice has been providing psychosocial counseling to more than 300 girls, and now seeks to establish vocational skills training programs providing them a pathway out of poverty while helping to support their families and communities.
For the past two years, ChildVoice has been providing psychosocial counseling, workshops, and social activities to more than 300 war-affected Nigerian girls who have been traumatized by Boko Haram and other violent insurgent groups. While this work has been successful in helping these girls recover psychologically from their trauma, they remain stuck in the economic limbo of poverty, unable to move forward and re-establish their lives due to a lack of marketable skills to get a job.
This project will establish comprehensive vocational skills training programs in agriculture, tailoring, and catering. These are all popular and highly marketable skills in Nigeria. Implementation of the project will require the hiring of instructors and purchasing of equipment, supplies, and curricular materials.
While relief is absolutely necessary to address the immediate needs of adolescent girls in crisis, it does little to provide them with the psychological and vocational skills they need to provide for themselves and lift themselves out of poverty. Market-relevant vocational training helps these girls break out of the limbo that prevails in the IDP camps and become wage earners or business owners, thereby improving the lives of their families, and ultimately, the well-being of their communities.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
