Govts, Humanitarian Actors Asked to Invest in Education for Poverty Reduction

By Michael Olugbode

Governments and humanitarian actors have been advised to invest heavily in education of Nigerian citizens as the only tenable option to reduce the growing poverty in the nation.

Speaking at a press conference on the Year 2021 Humanitarian Action Conference in Abuja, Executive Director of the InnerCity Mission, Omoh Alabi, said the only way to draw people out of poverty is through education, insisting that the government and all humanitarian stakeholders should heavily invest in education of the teeming populace.

Alabi, while noting that the Humanitarian Action Conference which holds on Thursday was organised to commemorate with the International Day of the Eradication of Poverty, lamented that many Nigerians are presently living in poverty, requiring something urgently to be done to alleviate their suffering.

She disclosed that InnerCity Mission, which is a faith based, non-governmental and non-political organisation, is drawing all humanitarian actors to the conference to proffer solutions to humanitarian crisis in the nation.

Alabi said: “InnerCity Mission has been in active operation and at the forefront of deploying intervention programmes to help the poor and the needy and eradicate poverty.”

She noted that: “All our intervention programmes are child centered and aligned with the UN SDGs through which we have impacted over 20 million direct and indirect beneficiaries to date apart from walking in the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria, we work in over 82 countries of the world deploying our programmes, our vision in the InnerCity Mission is pretty straightforward, we envision a world where often vulnerable excluded and deprived children will live free of poverty would achieve their God given potential though becoming adults that are profitable to society rather than task to society.”

She added that: “We believe that this is realisable where critical actors come together, government civil society, NGOs and all critical actors come together and collaborate and we can make a difference children are our future and if we ignore children we are ignoring our future, the world we have today was the one that was designed for us by our forebears but we have opportunity to design the world in front of us when we invest in children.”