Children’s Day: We Won’t Rest Until The Future Of Every Nigerian Child Is Guaranteed

KEYNOTE REMARKS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE LAUNCH OF THE SITUATION ANALYSIS OF CHILDREN IN NIGERIA EVENT ON THE 27TH OF MAY, 2022

PROTOCOLS

Before I begin, I think we should all rise (except the children) to give the children a round of applause on this very special day. Thank you very much, happy children’s day!

The Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning and UNICEF and other collaborating CSOs and development partners deserve our commendation for their hard work and resourcefulness in researching and producing these seminal reports. It is impossible to conceive and implement effective policies without a well-rounded view of the challenges on the ground. Particularly in a country as complex and nuanced as Nigeria.

It is clear from the Situation Analysis and the Multi-dimensional Child Poverty Reports that we still have vast amounts of ground to cover, and the urgency with which we need to do so is evident to us all.

Every child we lose to preventable causes diminishes us greatly. Every child that fails to live up to their potential because they did not have access to basic education and the tools needed to rise to the stature of their dreams, indicts every one of us and takes away from the sum of who we are as a people. We understand the cost of failure on a very visceral level, and this is what has driven our commitment to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty within the decade and to safeguard the future of every Nigerian child.

We can speak quite eloquently about the federal government’s National Poverty Reduction with Growth Strategy and its wide-ranging implications for creating decent livelihoods for millions. About the At-Risk Children’s Program, ARC-P, it combines formal education, skills and health as a multi-faceted community intervention led by the States and coordinated by the Federal Government.

We can speak about the urgency with which Nigeria’s SDG Implementation Plan (2020-2030) is being executed and the improvements we have made, in spite of the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in creating social safeguards for the family through the delivery of basic services, especially in water and sanitation. There are also the positive improvements we have witnessed in the provision of Universal Health Coverage and the increase in the attendance and care of women at birth.

We can also speak with some pride about this administration’s substantial progress in raising the number of States that have now enacted the Child’s​ Rights Law from 23 to 30 in just two years.

We can speak about how our community-based nutrition screening of children has enhanced support for quality services, thereby reaching thousands of children, and how simultaneous comprehensive public policies are making vast improvements in nutrition and safeguarding education. Policies like the North East Nigeria Maternal Nutrition, Infant and Young Child Nutrition Guidelines, including protocols, indicators and evaluation strategies; the National Policy on Safety, Security and violence-free schools, the guidelines which have been developed by the Federal Ministry of Education, and of course our continued engagement of the media and civil society in sensitizing the public on critical needs and conducting campaigns aimed at behavioural change as a prerequisite for improvement across all indices.

But as long as we still have an estimated huge number of out-of-school children, many more with severe and acute malnutrition, forced into early marriages, recruited into armed conflict, denied access to safe drinking water and hygiene, and subjected to sexual and gender-based violence, exploited, deprived of access to health and other rights, as long as we still have even just one child in deprivation and at risk, our work is certainly not done yet.
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The official YouTube Channel for Oluyemi Oluleke Osinbajo, Nigerian Lawyer and Politician who served as the Vice President of Nigeria from the 29th of May 2015 to the 29th of May 2023. Before this, he served as the Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice in Lagos State from 1999 to 2007.

With a background in law and governance, he currently chairs the Climate Action Platform for Africa and serves as a Global Advisor for the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet. He's also the Guardian of the Timbuktoo Africa Innovation Foundation and Chair of Future Perspectives.

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