SALUTE TO THE EXCELLENT FEW

On Friday, December 17, 2021, the S.A.F.E® for Children Society launched the #NOPROTECTIONNOSCHOOL campaign.

We stated in our broadcast that we will from today, Monday, December 20, 2021, begin the NO PROTECTION, NO SCHOOL DIRECTION STIMULATING DISCUSSIONS.

This is the first of the series and it is our attempt to celebrate those organisations, whose commitment to Child Protection we can vouch for.

It is not lost on us when we began this campaign that there are institutions of learning in Nigeria, who have shown commitment to regarding Child Protection as a prerequisite to providing care of the precious children under their care. They invest in establishing Child Protection System, codified into a POLICY, broken down into IMPLEMENTATION PROCESSES on which every stakeholder including parents and children are trained periodically and such system is subject to regular review.

Since we have been privileged to work with some of them, Why can’t we just bless these organisations with a mention? Well, that is not the purpose of this intervention? This is a declaration that there are examples of possibility both in terms of Child-Focused Organisations and schools, who are not only committed to the protection of the precious children under their care but put SYSTEM’S APPROACH into consistent practice. These rare institutions of learning reach out for best practices in the area of child protection as preventive measures.

These organisations are huge indictments on the Nigerian state, whose regulatory oversight within the school system should include child protection but seem to permanently look the other way, particularly as it concerns their own schools, where the precious children of hewers of wood and drawers of water are left at the mercy of the conscious and unconscious abusers.

Here is the assignment today, if you run a school or work in one, is your school one of the few? If your child is registered in a school, is the school one of the few?

Let us decide today to be part of the EXCELLENT FEW as we prepare for NEW TERM in 2022 and go out there as parents to find the few and put pressure on the government to enforce Section 2 of the Child Right Act, 2003.

Spread the word concerning the #NOPROTECTIONNOSCHOOL campaign within your areas of influence by sharing this piece and our launch broadcast here https://youtu.be/d3SR1ydXoac. A society, which only responds to tragedy and goes to bed for another to occur without caring about disabling the identified enabling environment for tragedy, is not only steeped in a drowning ocean of hypocrisy but dead to its humanity and conscience.

Do have an INSPIRED rest of the week.