The Bauchi State Government has said about 16,260 girls in junior and senior secondary schools in the state will benefit from its conditional cash transfer programme aimed at encouraging them to complete secondary school education.
The cash transfer, to be done through the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE) is to encourage girl-child education in the state with N5,000 for junior secondary and N10,000 for senior secondary girls.
However, to qualify for the initiative, each of the beneficiaries must have an average of 80 percent school attendance in a term.
Bauchi State AGILE focal person who is also the state commissioner for education, Dr Jamila Mohammed Dahiru disclosed this to reporters over on Sunday during a breakfast round table with the media in her office.
According to her, the money will be paid to the beneficiaries every term in order to encourage them to always return to school until graduation.
She also added that digital education programmes in order to empower the girls with ICT skills to make them self-reliant and continue pursuing their educational dreams in tertiary institutions is also part of the mix.
Dr Jamila said AGILE project is aimed at doing things differently in order to achieve an improved education sector through effective and efficient learning processes in a conducive environment.
She stressed that the project was to give girl-child who have dropped out of school due to economic issues the chance to go back to school and complete the second stage of education.
According to her, under the schools’ expansion component, the project would see to the construction and renovation of 120 schools with furniture.
AGILE is a World Bank-Assisted project of the Federal Ministry of Education geared at improving secondary education opportunities for adolescent girls aged between 10 and 12.
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