By Momasoh Marceline Lum
About 500 girls aged 15 to 25, from three regions in Cameroon; the East, Adamawa and Far North will soon benefit from second chance education project, an initiative of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, UN Women Cameroon. The information was disclosed last April 30, 2019 in Yaounde during a workshop to present results of the needs analysis of UN Women flagship project, Second Chance Education and Vocational Learning.
Speaking at the workshop, the project manager, Veye Estella Kinga said “We are here under the canopy of second chance education which is a project executed by UN Women Cameroon. The project is executed in 6 countries in the world and Cameroon happens to be the lone African country. Because we want to contextualize the project, we carried out the need assessment in the three concerned regions; East, Adamawa and Far North regions. We decided to do restitution for the results with partners and our collaborators so that they should provide some inputs to the results we got from the field.”
On what was identified as problem, she explained to reporters that “since we are targeting refugees and IDPs and host population, we identified that, women who, have abandoned school are very much vulnerable and therefore require some kind of empowerment to be able to adapt to the society. We also discovered that during crisis, women and children are the highest group of people who suffer.”
The three-year project implemented in partnership with the Ministry of Women Empowerment and the Family and the Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training, Civil Society organizations is expected to change the lives of the vulnerable women and girls through professional training to be offered to women after which, they will be provided with start-up kits to begin their own businesses.
The project is also expected to contribute to mentality change for both men and women to allow their girls to benefit from the second chance education extremely important in a society where the education of the girl child is perceived as something optional and not as a right.